What's So Civil About War Anyway?
by icbiwf
Summary: Panem, Pennsylvania, 1862: When all of her trading partners in town leave to join the Union army, Katniss Everdeen supports her family the only way she can: by enlisting to serve herself. Hoping desperately to avoid anyone from home who might recognize and expose her, what happens when she's assigned to the same company as the boy with the bread?
1. Chapter 1

This story began as a Prompts in Panem submission for their "Everlark at War" day, but it took on a life of its own and I decided to turn it into a multi-chapter fic. This first chapter should be enough to establish Peeta and Katniss and where they both are at the start of the story. I have a definite arc and a definite ending for this story but now that I'm not trying to limit it to one-shot length I'll probably add more meat the the middle, and more HG characters.

In case anyone was wondering: I don't own The Hunger Games.

...

_August 25, 1862_

Her plan was perfect. There were already rumors of other women secretly joining up to fight. She knew she was tough enough to serve in the army. She knew that with her hair cut short she could pass for one of the teenage boys signing up. She knew that her army pay would be enough to support Prim and their mother, something she couldn't do now that all trade in town had dried up amidst war worries. Trade had been growing scarce ever since the disaster at Bull Run a year earlier, but Lincoln's draft order earlier in the month had been the death knell for her ability to trade in town.

The really brilliant part, the part she had taken time to pat herself on the back about, was leaving her small hometown of Panem, Pennsylvania and traveling to the state capitol to join a volunteer regiment. Everyone from Panem was serving in the 47th Pennsylvania, and if she tried to join that regiment they'd recognize her in an instant. Gale in particular would expose her just to make sure she got sent home; he always had been overprotective. But by volunteering and going to the capitol, she wound up filling a spot in the First Volunteers. She shouldn't encounter anyone who might recognize her form home.

The idea was so perfect that someone else had already done the same thing.

"Mellark!" Captain Abernathy bellowed as he entered the tent. "Meet your new bunkmate. Peeta Mellark, Kat Everdeen. The two of you'll be bunking till we string up Jeff Davis. Or till one of you dies, I guess. But don't do that. Stay alive."

Captain Abernathy sure had a way of inspiring his troops.

…..

"Well, never expected to see you here."

Katniss gave him a hostile look. "What are you talking about?"

Peeta raised his hands, as if in surrender. "Come on, you don't need to pretend with me. I know we're not exactly friends back home, but you don't need to treat me like the enemy. 'Kat.'"

A tine flame of hope sprang to life in her soul. "You mean you won't turn me in?"

He looked shocked at the idea. "Of course not! Why on earth would I do that?"

"I'm not allowed to be here," she said vaguely. She didn't dare state the truth; they were only in a tent, who knew who might be listening from outside.

"It's life and death out here, Kat," he said, trying to get himself used to using the name. "You'll find that not many folks care about what's allowed. For instance, Haymitch is a drunk."

"Haymitch?"

"Captain Abernathy."

She was horrified. "Our captain is a drunk?"

Peeta smiled at her reaction. "Yep. Don't let that affect your opinion of him, he's handy on the battlefield. Just don't expect him to be coherent later that night."

Katniss shook her head. "Sounds like I have a lot to learn about being in the army."

"Here's hoping you'll get the chance to learn it," Peeta said.

It wasn't until he saw her horrified expression that he realized what he'd just said. "Sorry," he said timidly. "Gallows humor. You'll be more comfortable with it after a few battles." He decided to change the subject. "Will you tell me what happened at home that you're here now? I can't imagine you left Prim willingly."

Katniss debated whether or not to answer. She decided that keeping Peeta as an ally would probably help her survive this mess. "What happened was that everyone left. There weren't enough people left in town to keep supporting Mom and Prim by trading game, and certainly no one willing to give a job to a woman."

"But they could live on a soldier's pay," Peeta finished for her. "Wow. You literally went to war for your family."

Katniss scowled. "Don't mock me."

Peeta's eyes went wide in surprise. "Who's mocking you? I'm in awe."

"You're just saying that to poke fun at me," Katniss said sullenly.

"I'm saying it because it's true," Peeta protested. "You've dedicated your entire life to taking care of your family, when by all rights at your age your family should still be taking care of you, and now you've literally put yourself into a war just to make sure they have enough. Do you honestly not see how remarkable you are?"

Katniss was uncomfortable with where the conversation was heading, as she always was when she received compliments. So she changed the subject. "What about you? When you vanished last year there was some talk that you'd joined the army, but nobody's heard anything about you since then. It's like you fell off the face of the earth."

"I'm hiding from my mother," he said sheepishly. "She would never allow one of her sons to do anything so common as serve in the army, so I snuck away to the capitol to enlist. If she knew where I was, she'd get her cousin the senator to get me out, or get me transferred to a unit guarding the Canadian border or something. What about you, who are you hiding from?"

"Everyone," she said. "Most everyone from Panem is in the 47th, I wouldn't last two seconds in there before someone recognized me." She paused to consider him. She hated owing people, and she already owed this Peeta Mellark so much. Now she owed him even more for not turning her in. "Peeta, I don't know how I can ever repay you for not turning me in."

"You don't owe me anything."

"Of course I do! This was the only way I could earn enough money to support Prim and my mother. With your discretion, you're literally saving their lives." After a moment, she added in a soft voice, "Again."

"Again?" he questioned.

"You probably don't remember this, but a few years ago, you gave me some bread-"

"Of course I remember," Peeta cut her off. "It was right after your father died, and you looked like you were going to drop at any moment. How could I forget that?"

"You never mentioned it," Katniss said.

"Didn't think it was my place to," Peeta said. "Figured if you wanted to talk about it you'd bring it up, and if not I wasn't going to force you."

Katniss was floored for a moment. _He_ had saved _her_ life, and then _he_ was careful not to make _her_ uncomfortable about it? People that nice didn't really exist, did they?

"Katniss, you don't owe me anything for the bread."

"That bread was the first food we'd had in days. Me, my mother, Prim, none of us would be alive right now if it wasn't for that bread. I'll never stop owing you for that."

"If you really think you owe me, then here's what you can do for me: Stop acting like you owe me. I gave you that bread because I wanted to help you. You just said that it helped you. Good; that's my reward."

"But-"

"Tell you what, can we at least table this discussion until after you've been in your first battle? After that, we'll each owe each other our lives so many times over that you'll lose count."

…..

_October 5, 1862_

He was right.

Less than a month after "Kat" Everdeen joined the First Pennsylvania Volunteers, she got her first real taste of battle, at Antietam Creek in Maryland. There had been a few small skirmishes before that, and each one had filled her with a terror she hadn't felt since that day in the rain, when she had been ready to die, until an angel appeared with two loaves of burned bread. _This is what it feels like when you're about to die_, she realized, and she knew she was going to have to get used to the feeling if she was going to last long in this war.

But then, she still had that same angel with her. Peeta had been right about Antietam, after the chaos of battle she owed her life to all of her fellow soldiers, and they all owed their lives to her, and there was no way to account for all the owing. And somehow that only made her feel more indebted to Peeta Mellark, because in the middle of the chaos he was an anchor she could cling to. Something from home to remind her that this wasn't all some surreal nightmare.

But she didn't talk about it anymore. For all that he was helping her, from keeping her secret to keeping her sane to being a soothing presence when she woke up from terrifying nightmares about the battle, she could at least do him the favor of not bringing up the one subject he had said he didn't want to discuss. So she didn't talk to him about it anymore. But she didn't stop feeling like she owed him.

It had been several weeks since Antietam, and they hadn't seen any major action since then. She and Peeta were sitting around the fire with several other members of the First Volunteers. They were an odd bunch, but Katniss decided she liked most of them.

In his mid-30s, Caesar was the old man of the group, with hair so black that it almost looked blue in the firelight. She didn't even know his first name, he never used it and neither did anyone else. He was a gregarious guy, always helping the younger guys feel at ease. And when he and Peeta started going back and forth with each other, the entire company sat back to watch the show.

Doc Aurelius was another good guy. He was quiet and kept to himself, and Katniss could respect that. He was a doctor back home, but had wound up with the First instead of the medical corps. Peeta had suggested that she tell Doc Aurelius about her situation; getting injured and sent to the medics was the most likely way of her being found out, and having a doctor who could treat her in confidence might help prevent that. Katniss wasn't sure she was ready to trust him that much, though.

Andrew Cato and Jonathan Marvel were the careers: newly-minted Lieutenants fresh from West Point, not enlistees like the rest of the company. They couldn't stand the disorganized, slovenly, drunken Captain they'd been assigned to serve under, and Haymitch wasn't too fond of them either. They mostly kept to themselves, rather than take out their frustrations on the enlistees they were technically in charge of.

Katniss couldn't help but think of some of the people missing from their gathering. Jackson, Mitchell, Homes, and Messalla had all been lost at Antietam. She had barely been here a month and was already losing friends and comrades.

Right now the focus was on Finnick Odair, the veteran. He had been a career officer like Cato and Marvel, he had graduated from West Point in '54, but quit the army four years later to settle down when his wife, Annie, became pregnant with their first child. He had re-enlisted when the war began, but for reasons he wouldn't go into he hadn't been restored to his previous rank. Haymitch treated Finnick more like a legitimate junior officer than he did Cato and Marvel.

Caesar liked to get Finnick talking about Annie and the kids, because it completely transformed the man. Odair normally maintained a cocky bravado, but it completely disappeared when he talked about his family. Whatever else the man was, it was obvious that he loved his wife and kids.

Eventually Caesar tired of Finnick and turned his attention to Katniss. "What about you, lad, you got a girl back home? Or is it too early for that quite yet?"

Due to "his" appearance, many of the men thought Kat Everdeen was a very young teenager who had skirted the age limits to enlist. She and Peeta encouraged this view, because it was better they think that than stumble upon the truth, but it did become insulting sometimes. "No, no girls for me yet," she told him.

Caesar smiled at her. "Well, just wait till you go home after the war. Then you'll be a dashing war hero, you'll have to beat the girls off with a stick!" They all laughed at that. Katniss gave them her best fake smile.

"What about you, Mellark?" Caesar asked next. "Do you have a girlfriend back home?" As usual, the rest of the men fell silent to watch the Caesar and Peeta show.

Peeta smiled sadly. "No, no girlfriend for me, either."

"Come on," Caesar said in a teasing tone. "Handsome guy like you? There must be some special girl." Peeta shook his head to deny it, but his blush gave him away. "Come on, what's her name?" Caesar asked.

"Well, there is this one girl," Peeta finally admitted. "I've had a crush on her ever since I can remember. But she barely knows I'm alive."

"She have another fellow?" Caesar asked him.

"No, I don't think she does. But I'm hardly the only guy interested."

"So, here's what you do," Caesar said. "Same thing as Everdeen here, once we win, you're a hero. She can't turn you down then, eh?"

"Come on, Caesar," Peeta said. "I'm hardly a hero."

"Well, we all know that. But that doesn't mean you can't be a hero to your special lady!" Caesar said with a conspiratorial wink, earning laughs from everyone.

Later, when Peeta and Katniss were in their tent bedding down for the night, for some reason Katniss couldn't get the conversation out of her mind. She kept trying to figure out who Peeta might have been talking about. Pretty much all of the girls from town were aware of the kind, handsome baker's son. There weren't a lot of people in Panem who could be assured of being well fed; marrying the town baker held quite the appeal for many. And regardless of whether they were interested or not, there was only one bakery in Panem, and Peeta had worked there every day for as long as Katniss could remember. So how could anyone barely notice him, like he said this girl did?

Eventually Peeta caught her staring, and asked what was going on. She had no choice but to confess. "I'm trying to figure out who this girl of yours is. There aren't that many girls in Panem, I thought I should be able to figure it out."

Peeta smiled sadly. "I promise you, it's the last person you would ever think of."

Katniss wracked her brain for a minute, before coming up with the last person she would ever think of. "Oh my god, it's not Prim is it?"

Truly, that was the last person Peeta would ever think of as well. "What? No! No, not Prim! Jesus, isn't she like 13?"

"14," Katniss corrected him.

"Still a bit young for me, don't you think?"

"You said the last person I would ever think of."

"Yeah, well, since you've thought of Prim but not the right person, I'm still right about that."

Katniss thought for a bit longer, still not coming up with any suitable candidates. "They're right, you know," she said eventually, just to make conversation. "Every girl in town is going to be looking to land herself a war hero."

"Not every girl," Peeta said, his voice laced with more meaning than Katniss was able to draw from the statement. "Besides, I'm not a hero."

Peeta sounded so sad when talking about this girl, for some reason she wasn't quite willing to analyze Katniss wanted to cheer him up, to give him hope with his girl the way he had given her hope with the bread all those years ago. "Peeta, when we go home, everyone who fought will be a war hero. And if you're not, just make something up! You have such a talent with words. I'm sure you can tell some stories that will make your girl swoon."

Peeta just shook his head. "No, I could never lie to this girl about my war experience. That wouldn't help in my case."

"Why ever not?"

Peeta appeared to be fighting with himself. Was he about to tell her who this mystery girl was? "Why not, Peeta? You can trust me. You've kept enough of my secrets."

Finally Peeta answered, his eyes fixed on the tent above them. "Because…" He had to stop for just a moment before he could finally say it. "Because she came here with me."

The tent was dead silent. It was almost three full minutes before either of them spoke. "I'll thank you not to mock me, Peeta Mellark," Katniss said, her voice full of acid.

It was her tone of voice that finally got Peeta to look her in the eyes. Those big, beautiful silver eyes that he had never had the nerve to look into for more than a second before flitting his gaze away in embarrassment. "I'm not mocking you, Katniss," he said, using her real name for the first time since she had shown up in camp.

"Why else would you say such a preposterous thing?"

"Because it's true," Peeta said matter-of-factly. "I just said I could never lie to you."

"That itself is a lie!" Katniss struggled to control her voice, not wanting to attract the attention of anyone outside their tent. "I do not understand what sick amusement you're getting from this game, but I'd ask you to quit it!"

Peeta stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. "Oh, I should have expected this."

"Expected what?"

He looked back at her. "You're so loath to see the good in yourself, that you're angry at me because I do see it!"

Katniss didn't even know how to deal with that statement. She was afraid that if she tried to argue, he'd start listing off all this supposed good he saw in her, so she changed the subject. "If this crush of yours is real, how long have you been harboring it, exactly?"

"Since we were five," he answered without hesitation.

Katniss almost choked. "Since we were _five_?"

"You don't remember our first day of school, do you?" Kids in Panem didn't get much schooling; whether from a mining family or a merchant family in town, most kids went to work young. But they did have a schoolhouse, where Miss Trinket made sure that every child in Panem got at least a few years of formal instruction in writing and mathematics. "You were wearing a red plaid dress, and you had your hair in two braids back then. My father actually pointed you out to me when he dropped me off that morning. He said, 'See that little girl over there? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with a coal miner.'"

"What?" Katniss truly didn't know whether to believe him or not. She did wear her hair in two braids when she was younger, and she did remember a red plaid skirt she had when she was a child. But the baker and her mother? Impossible! "That's not true, about your father and my mother. It can't be."

"Well, that's what he told me. I even asked him, 'Why did she marry a coal miner when she could have had you?' And he told me, 'Because when he sings, even the birds stop to listen.'"

Katniss fought hard to stop the tears that wanted to fill her eyes. That was a low blow, bringing up her father's truly angelic singing voice. She could still remember their trips through the forest, when it seemed like the whole world quieted itself to make way for his voice. "That's true," she choked out, "they do. I mean, they did."

Peeta noticed her distress, but he had the decency to not mention it. "Well, that day, we had a music assembly. Miss Trinket asked if any of the new students knew the valley song, and your hand shot right up in the air. She stood you at the front of the room, and you sang, and I swear every bird outside fell silent. And somehow I just knew, just like your mother, I was a goner as soon as I heard you sing."

Katniss felt a few tears slip. It really was a beautiful story that Peeta was telling, it only proved her point that he could probably woo any girl he set his sights on. Perhaps the most distressing part was how much Katniss _wanted_ it to be true, how much hearing this story of young love and devotion made her want to it for herself. But deep down she knew that it couldn't be true. Nobody as good and kind and noble as Peeta Mellark would give a second look sullen, starving, scowling Katniss Everdeen. He could have any girl in town, why would he waste his time with the surly daughter of a dead coal miner? She wished he would just give up this cruel game of trying to make her feel valued, and finally admit that she wasn't.

For his part, Peeta again ignored any distress he noticed. "That day, when we had our lunch break, I actually worked up the nerve to talk to you. I'll always remember that, because it was the only real interaction we had until you started trading at the bakery." Peeta smiled a small, sad smile, remembering his first interaction with Katniss Everdeen. Katniss didn't understand it until he continued. "I spent about five minutes working up my nerve, then I walked up to you and asked if I could sit with you. Once I sat down, you just stared at me, and my throat closed up and I didn't know what to say. I had an apple tart for lunch that day, so I pulled it out and I offered you half of it. You said to me, and I quote, 'I don't need your charity,' and you got up and walked away. We didn't speak again for seven years."

Katniss just shook her head. It was practically the perfect example of why no one could feel for her the things Peeta claimed to feel for her. She was mean, standoffish, surly, and if anyone ever tried to work past any of that she immediately pushed them away. The only person she hadn't pushed away was Gale, and that was only because she needed a hunting partner at the time.

Peeta was done with his story, but Katniss didn't have anything to say that she hadn't already said, so they sat in increasingly uncomfortable silence. Finally, after what felt like forever, Peeta spoke again. "Katniss I'm sorry." The statement grabbed her attention like no other could have; was he finally going to admit his cruel deception? "I didn't mean to dump everything onto you like this. I know, um, I know you don't feel for me the same things I feel for you. And that's fine, I don't expect you to. Please don't feel like I expect anything from you. Truthfully, I wasn't even planning on saying anything, but you were asking about it and you were so persistent, and I've been dreaming for thirteen years what it would be like to tell you I love you, I- I just couldn't hold it all back anymore. I know I've made you uncomfortable, and I'm sorry."

As if this conversation couldn't get any more uncomfortable, now Peeta had thrown the word _love_ at her. Katniss was beyond wanting Peeta to take it all back now; now she just wanted this conversation to end. She needed to stop this before it got any worse.

Peeta seemed to be waiting for some response from her, and eventually she gave him one. "You were right. It was the last person I ever would have thought of."

After a moment of dead silence, Peeta let loose his laughter. It was more than laughter, it was all the tension of the entire conversation being released. Peeta understood the message Katniss was sending with that remark, even if Katniss didn't fully understand it herself. _Okay, fine, whatever. I don't want this to change anything between us._ That was fine with Peeta, it was actually a better reaction to his revelation than he ever would have hoped for.

"Told you so," he said in response.


	2. Chapter 2

_AN: First of all, thank you so much for the reaction to the first chapter. It's great to see so many people take an interest in this story. _

_Second, a warning on this chapter: This chapter gets a bit rough at times. There is mention (but not description) of rape and underage sexual abuse, a la Mockingjay and 14-year-old Finnick Odair. This chapter also has some of the characters using period-appropriate terms to refer to African-American characters, terms that are now considered, at best, outdated and inappropriate. _

_Third, I still don't own The Hunger Games, nor do I own the song Tomorrow Will Be Kinder by the Secret Sisters, whose lyrics I quote in this chapter._

_Fourth, thank you so much for reading! Hope I've made it worth your while. _

…..

_February 22, 1863_

"Hey, Captain Marvel, what's going on?"

The new company commander turned to regard Katniss and Peeta. Lieutenant Marvel had become Captain Marvel just a few weeks prior, when Captain Abernathy had become Major Abernathy. Marvel was okay as far as careers went; the only one who had any real problem with his promotion was Lieutenant Cato, who felt he had deserved the spot over Marvel. Lieutenant Odair had great fun riling Cato up about it.

There was some kind of commotion going on that had drawn Katniss and Peeta out of their tent, but they were too far away to see what it was. They waited for their Captain to explain. "You guys know Joe Mason from the 32nd Maine?" Marvel asked them.

Katniss just shook her head. "I was on forage duty with him once, if I'm thinking of the right guy," Peeta answered, remembering the small man with a no-nonsense attitude and wide-set brown eyes. "He could turn a tree into firewood in three minutes flat, man was amazing with an axe."

Captain Marvel snickered. "Yeah, well maybe you should have looked a little closer, Mellark." He left them in confusion for a moment before continuing. "Turns out Joe Mason was actually a girl named Jo_hanna_ Mason. Came down with camp fever and the medics discovered her, ah, little secret."

"Must be a different guy," Peeta covered quickly. "The soldier I'm thinking of was a big, broad-shouldered guy with a long black beard."

"Yeah, didn't think even you were that blind," Marvel said with another snicker. "Imagine that, having a woman in your company and nobody noticing!" He walked away, still laughing at the idea.

Peeta and Katniss exchanged worried looks. They had to talk to Doc Aurelius.

…..

_May 12, 1863_

This was supposed to be a fairly easy mission. They had reports that several large farms in this area were storing weapons intended for the Confederate army. The First had been sent to clear out any Confederate sympathizers amongst the landowners in the area. Weapons were to be seized, slaves were to be liberated, and any food stores that they came across would be a welcome relief from army rations.

There weren't very many large slaveholders in this part of Virginia – which was part of the reason why in just over a month this wouldn't even be part of Virginia anymore, as the admission of West Virginia to the union became official – but what they'd found at the Snow Estate had turned their stomachs.

They'd all heard stories of the mistreatment that slaves sometimes received, but the brutality they found amongst the former Snow slaves was beyond their imaginings. Men, women, and children, all viciously beaten. Whole families starved. Women raped. And of course, the scars. Scars from beatings, scars from whippings. Lasting reminders of the cruelty people were capable of inflicting on one another.

One particularly tall, broad man with a back full of criss-crossing scars was standing next to Lieutenant Cato as Cato yelled up into a tree. They were trying to move everyone they found on the property into one group so they could make an accurate count, and also to keep them under watch in case any of them were dangerous. It was Cato's yelling that first attracted Katniss's attention. Apparently someone was up the tree and reluctant to come down. When Cato climbed partway up the tree only to snap a branch and fall back to the ground, Katniss laughed so hard Peeta came over to see what had happened to her.

Peeta. There was a conundrum she hadn't figured out. Several months ago he had said that he loved her, but he hadn't mentioned anything about it since then. Did that mean that it wasn't true? Or that it at least wasn't true anymore? Or was it just that he knew that the subject made her uncomfortable, and Peeta Mellark was just the right combination of considerate and masochistic that he would work side-by-side everyday, not to mention share a tent every night, with the woman he loved without ever bringing it up?

Deep down, Katniss knew which one was true.

But as self-sacrificing as Peeta was to go through every day hiding his love, Katniss was selfish enough to let him. It was just another example of why he deserved someone better than her. She had no idea how to handle the situation, so just like when he didn't bring up the bread for seven years, so long as he didn't bring up his love then she could ignore it and pretend it didn't exist.

Except, if she was being honest with herself, that's not what she was doing, was she? No, she was only ignoring it by day, but actively taking advantage of it at night when the nightmares hit. Ever since Antietam she'd had horrible nightmares about the battle, about dying in battle, about Prim dying in battle, and though she would never admit it, sometimes about Peeta dying in battle. Peeta had nightmares too, though his didn't seem to affect him as badly. But they both found that having someone there to wake them, someone to let them know that they were safe, someone to tell them that it wasn't real, was a huge assistance in dealing with the nightmares. And she knew that the reason having her there was such a help to him was because he loved her, and she knew that the reason why he was always there for her was because he loved her. But she never said anything, because she didn't know what to say. And he never said anything, because he didn't want to make her feel uncomfortable. So nothing was ever said. They'd cry together at night and then pretend the next morning that nothing had ever happened, and that was the extent of their relationship. Hell, could they even call it a relationship?

_Peeta probably did_, she thought, feeling guilty all over again.

Cato's shouting was only getting louder. The two of them decided to go see if they could help him out.

"I'm warning you one last time, get down here you little wretch!" They could see the colored man next to Cato was barely containing his rage. Obviously he didn't care for Cato's treatment of whoever was up that tree. Cato was oblivious.

"Having trouble, Lieutenant?" Peeta called out as they approached.

Cato huffed out a breath. "We've got 120 of these people rounded up by the back barn, no problem, but this one little bitch wants to hide up a tree!" He lifted his head to return to yelling up the tree. "You know we're here to help you, you ungrateful little-"

"_Cato_," Peeta interrupted him. "Why don't you let Kat and me take a crack at this? You can get back to more important issues." If you wanted something out of Cato, stroking his ego was usually the way to go.

"Fine," he agreed, "you waste your time here. I do indeed have more important things to do." He stomped off without a second look.

"Sorry about Cato," Katniss said to the large man. "He's a bit of a jerk sometimes."

"I noticed," the man replied in a deep voice, then resumed his silence.

"I'm Kat Everdeen, this is Peeta Mellark."

The man eyed them for what felt like a long time. "Thresh," he finally said.

Katniss peered up the tree, but she had to squint to get a glimpse of the girl up there through the foliage. Whatever her story was, she was a hell of a tree climber. As good as Katniss herself.

"Mr. Thresh-" Peeta began.

"Just Thresh."

"Okay, _Thresh_," Peeta started again, "Can you tell us who is up this tree?"

It's another long moment before Thresh answers. "Her name's Rue."

"Are you related?"

"Not by blood," Thresh answered. "I've been sort of watching over her since Master Snow bought her. Not that I could really do anything to protect her," he added bitterly.

"So why is Rue up this tree instead of over by the barn getting checked out by our medics and eating some of the smoked pork Snow left behind like everyone else is?" Peeta asked.

Thresh gave him a long, appraising look before answering. "She doesn't like being around white men. Gives her fits. She's been through a lot."

"More than everyone else?" Peeta asked.

"Yes," was all Thresh said in answer.

Katniss marveled that someone with those kinds of scars on their back could stand there and say that someone else had been through a lot. "If I climb up there, will she talk to me? Or just run away to another tree?"

Thresh snorted. "You can't climb as high as she can."

"Yes I can," Katniss said matter-of-factly. There was no bragging or bravado in her tone, she was merely stating a fact.

The quiet confidence in her voice prompted Thresh to spend another long moment staring at her, as if he was reappraising her. Whatever he saw made him decide to answer her. "Told you, she can't be around a white man. She'll freak out, run, find a new hiding place."

"Why?" she asked.

Thresh didn't respond to her question. Peeta tried again. "Thresh, I know Cato was an asshole, but he was right about one thing: We do need Rue to come down eventually. Please, maybe if we knew why she was so afraid of us, we could do something to defuse the whole situation."

"Ain't nothing you can do but leave her alone," Thresh said.

"You don't know that," Peeta insisted. "You don't know what we can do."

"How old is Rue?" Katniss asked after Thresh didn't respond to Peeta.

"Fourteen."

"My sister's fourteen."

"Your sister hasn't been through what Rue has."

"How do you know that?" Katniss challenged. "You know about as much about my sister as we know about Rue."

Thresh just resumed his silence. "Tell us how to help her," Katniss asked him.

"There's nothing any white man can do for her," he said. "She won't let you."

"What if I wasn't a man?" Katniss asked. She was greeted by equally shocked expressions from both of the men with her.

"Kat…" Peeta began, but Katniss didn't let him finish.

"What if I only pretended to be a man so they'd let me in the army? What if I was actually a woman named Katniss?" She could see the anguish on Peeta's face; he was convinced that she was about to be sent home. But something in her told her that she could trust this Thresh, that he was an honorable man who would reciprocate the trust she was putting in him by telling him her secret. At least she hoped he was; Thresh's face was as guarded and stoic as Peeta's was expressive. "What if I've been raising my sister practically on my own since I was eleven so I have a particular empathy towards girls her age who have faced hardships in their lives? What if I trusted you enough to tell you all of that?" She gave Thresh a stare just as hard as his own. "What then?"

The silence hung heavily between them. Peeta didn't dare break into whatever staredown Thresh and Katniss were having.

Finally Thresh spoke. "Snow… _sold_ her."

Katniss and Peeta exchanged a quick look. What could be so bad about that? Wasn't being sold by one owner to a new one just part of being a slave? From what they had seen, being sold away from Snow would probably have been a good thing.

"Was this recently?" Peeta asked. "I mean, why is she still here if Snow sold her away?"

Thresh shook his head. "You don't understand. He didn't sell her like that. He sold her to _men_. Like a _whore_."

Katniss felt her jaw fall open, but somehow none of the muscles in her face would work to close it. All she could think of was Prim. Sweet, innocent Prim. Prim who cried over the body of a rabbit the one time Katniss had tried to take her hunting. Prim who went around town healing people. Prim… She couldn't even finish the thought. She couldn't even imagine… _that_ happening to Prim. If she did something would probably break in her mind.

"How long…?" Peeta managed to choke out.

"Ever since Snow bought her," Thresh said. "Since she was twelve."

Katniss felt like she was going to fall over. "Oh god," Peeta blurted out. "Oh god. Oh… Oh, I'm gonna be sick…" Peeta clamped one hand over his mouth and ran for a cluster of bushes nearby.

After a minute or two, Katniss regained her composure. Peeta's retching had quieted enough that they could no longer hear it from so far away. She squared her shoulders and faced the tree. "I'm going to go talk to her."

"You can't," Thresh said. "She won't let you."

Katniss didn't respond to Thresh, she walked up to the base of the tree and called up to Rue. "Hey, Rue? My name's Katniss. I'm gonna climb up there so we can talk. I won't come too close to you, just enough that we don't have to yell at each other. Okay?" She got no response, but then she hadn't been expecting one. She began climbing.

When she was half-way up the tree, she stopped for a moment. She could see Rue much better from here. Rue had positioned herself in some of the thinnest branches at the very top of the tree. Thresh was right, Katniss thought, even she couldn't have climbed out on those small branches. "Rue, I'm half way up now," she said. It was completely unnecessary, Rue could see her as easily as she could see Rue, but she wanted to maintain conversation with the girl, even if it was one-sided. "I'm going to climb up a little higher, but I'll stay down here near the trunk. Is that okay?" Getting no response, she continued climbing.

She continued climbing until she was within easy sight of the girl. She turned to look at her, but stayed near the trunk as she had said she would. "Rue? Rue, will you talk to me?" Rue still didn't respond, but from this distance she could hear the girl whimpering. She was so scared she was crying in fright. Katniss's heart went out to the girl, and she felt horrible that her presence was bringing more fear into the life of a girl who had suffered so much already.

Without an idea of how to handle the situation, she thought again of Prim. When Prim was scared, or when she had a nightmare, sometimes the only thing that would calm her was singing. Katniss would sing her the lullabies that their father used to sing to them. She hadn't sung to anyone other than Prim since he died, but she didn't know what else to try in this situation.

She was somewhat nervous. Nobody but her family had ever heard her sing. Well, other than Peeta, she supposed, but she quickly shut that thought down. This was no time to get lost thinking about whatever was going on between her and Peeta.

"Sometimes, when my sister is scared, I'll sing her a song. Is it okay if I sing for you, Rue?" She didn't get a response, but again, she wasn't expecting one. She took a deep breath and began to sing.

_Deep in the meadow, under the willow_  
_A bed of grass, a soft green pillow_  
_Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes_  
_And when again they open, the sun will rise._  
_Here it's safe, here it's warm_  
_Here the daisies guard you from every harm_  
_Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true_  
_Here is the place where I love you._

Rue seemed to be calming; Katniss couldn't hear her crying anymore. Rather than pushing things, she sang another verse.

_Deep in the meadow, hidden far away_  
_A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray_  
_Forget your woes and let your troubles lay_  
_And when again it's morning, they'll wash away._  
_Here it's safe, here it's warm_  
_Here the daisies guard you from every harm_  
_Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true_  
_Here is the place where I love you._

Katniss was quiet for a minute, hoping Rue would say something. Somewhat surprisingly, her patience was rewarded.

"I've never heard a boy with a voice that beautiful before," a small voice called out.

Katniss couldn't help but smile; Rue's voice was soft and sweet, just like Prim's. She decided that now was the time to lay all her cards out on the table. "Can you keep a secret, Rue? I'm not a boy."

"What?"

"My name is Katniss. But I'm pretending to be a boy named Kat so they'll let me be in the army."

She could see Rue cock her head in thought. "Why do you want to be in the army so bad?"

Katniss wasn't comfortable discussing her personal life, but she needed to trust this girl if she wanted her trust in return. "Cause I need the army pay to support my sister and my mother."

Rue seemed to think for another moment. "You must love your family a lot."

Katniss's voice caught in her throat as she answered. "I do."

They were quiet for a while after that, but it wasn't a tense, uncomfortable quiet like before. "My mother used to sing to me," Rue said at length.

"My father would sing to me when I was a girl," Katniss shared. "He died when I was eleven."

"I was sold away from Mama when I was twelve," Rue said.

They were quiet again until Rue asked, "Can you sing again?"

Taking any request from Rue as a sign of progress, Katniss didn't dare refuse to sing again.

_Black clouds are behind me_  
_I now can see ahead_  
_Often I wonder why I try _  
_Hoping for an end_  
_Sorrow weighs my shoulders down_  
_And trouble haunts my mind_  
_But I know the present will not last_  
_And tomorrow will be kinder_

_Tomorrow will be kinder_  
_It's true, I've seen it before_  
_A brighter day is coming my way_  
_Yes, tomorrow will be kinder _

Katniss snuck a look to check on Rue's mood. She had her eyes closed, with a small smile on her lips. Katniss continued with the next verse of the song.

_Today I've cried a many tear_  
_And pain is in my heart_  
_Around me lies a somber scene_  
_I don't know where to start_  
_But I feel warmth on my skin_  
_The stars have all aligned_  
_The wind has blown, but now I know_  
_That tomorrow will be kinder_

_Tomorrow will be kinder_  
_I know, I've seen it before_  
_A brighter day is coming my way_  
_Yes, tomorrow will be kinder_  
_A brighter day is coming my way_  
_Yes, tomorrow will be kinder_

After she finished singing, Katniss again waited for Rue to speak first. "You want me to climb down, don't you?"

"I do," Katniss answered, sticking to her decision to be as honest as possible with Rue. "They want to get everyone out in the open, so we can keep an eye on them and make sure nobody does anything… unexpected."

Rue's eyes widened. "You think one of the slaves would attack you?"

"Well, wouldn't you have? If Lieutenant Cato had cornered you somewhere?"

Rue's head drops in shame. "I guess."

"Rue, it's all right," Katniss said quickly, trying to reassure the girl. "I didn't mean anything by it. I'm just saying, we have over a hundred people here, and we know nothing about any of them. We need to be cautious."

Rue still didn't respond. "Will you come down with me?" Katniss asked. "We don't have to go anywhere, we'll just sit down under the shade of the tree. How about that?"

Rue lifted her head slightly. "Just you and me?"

"Thresh is waiting down there for us," Katniss told her. "And one other soldier, a boy from my town named Peeta." She saw Rue tense up at this news, and she rushed to reassure the girl. "It's okay! Peeta's a good guy, he's my…" _What the hell do I call Peeta?_ "He's a friend."

Rue still seemed tense, so Katniss tried to calm her. "Really, Peeta's nice. He, um, he knows about me. My secret. He's the only soldier that knows about me, everyone else we have to lie to."

Rue finally spoke. "Do you trust Peeta?"

The question caught Katniss off guard, and she surprised herself a bit with her answer. "Yes, I do."

"Okay," Rue said in an unsteady voice. "Then I'll try to trust him too."

Katniss was unexpectedly moved by the gesture. "Thank you, Rue." Rue didn't say anything else, and they were silent as the descended to the ground. Katniss found her thoughts turning to Peeta; in the last minute and a half he had gone from completely undefinable to a friend she trusted. Rue seemed to be quite the catalyst for defining her scattered thinking about Peeta. What would he be by the end of the day?

…..

Katniss had been up the tree for nearly twenty minutes. Peeta and Thresh were too far away to hear whatever was being said, though a couple of times Peeta thought he could hear Katniss singing. It was still the most beautiful thing he had ever heard.

The afternoon sun was beating down on them. Peeta had already shed several layers of his army uniform, but he knew from last year that he should at least keep the shirt. His very fair, stereotypically townie complexion didn't stand up very well to prolonged sun exposure.

"You can go sit under the tree," Thresh suggested, breaking their long silence.

Peeta shook his head. "I think I should keep my distance, no need to be right there and spook the girl when she climbs down."

Thresh just nodded. He agreed, though he hadn't expected Peeta to understand the situation so well. He also thought Peeta's use of the word _when_ was a bit optimistic.

Finally, they saw two figures emerge from the concealment of the leaves and drop to the ground, an olive-skinned soldier and a colored girl only a few inches shorter. Thresh ran over and engulfed the tiny girl in a huge bear hug. Peeta approached far more slowly, stopping completely fifteen feet away.

Katniss came over to him. "How'd it go?" he asked.

She shrugged at him. "She came down."

Peeta nodded. "Well, I can't imagine anybody who could refuse you anything once you sing for them."

Katniss raised an eyebrow. "You could hear me?"

"Not very well," he said. "But I'd recognize your singing anywhere."

Before Katniss could figure out how she wanted to respond to that, Rue spoke up. "So is that the other soldier?"

Peeta stepped away from Katniss so he could face Rue. She was standing in front of Thresh, but she was leaning back into him as if she wished she could disappear. Peeta put on his best smile. "Hi Rue. I'm Peeta."

Rue considered him for a long moment. "You look sick," she said bluntly.

Peeta's smile shifted towards a grimace. "Well, Thresh told us a little about your, um, situation. So I was just puking over in those bushes."

Rue nodded, as if in understanding. "Sometimes I puke too. After."

"I can't even imagine," Peeta said. "You must be so strong."

"I'm not strong," Rue snapped, her voice accusing. "I'm a weak little girl, that's why they can do that to me."

"There are different kinds of strength," Peeta said gently. "You're not strong like you could squish me like a bug like Thresh. But you have inner strength. You have the strength to survive. The only other person I know who's that strong is Katniss."

Nobody said anything for just a moment, and that was long enough for Katniss's hunter's senses to detect the approaching footsteps. She turned urgently to Peeta and told him, "Cato."

They'd been working together long enough that they understood each other, so he knew what she was saying even though he couldn't hear Cato's approach. "I'll hold him off, go get Marvel."

She nodded and sprinted off. Captain Marvel was the only one in the company who could overrule Cato, and Peeta knew how to handle Marvel just like he knew how to handle Cato earlier. If you wanted something out of Cato, you stroked his ego. If you wanted something out of Marvel, you provoked a pissing contest between him and Cato. And Cato tended to be only too happy to help with those efforts.

"Mellark," Cato called as he finally came within view. "I see you got the little bitch out of the tree. Good job. Let's move them to the barn with the others."

"Afraid not, Lieutenant. She gets real skittish around other people, we don't want to risk her running away again." Peeta had decided before opening his mouth that he would go into as little detail as possible about what it was that spooked Rue and why. "Kat and I will keep an eye on her away from the others."

Cato's expression darkened. "You're not disobeying our orders, are you, Mellark?"

Peeta held his arms out, as if in surrender, but his voice remained firm. "Look, just back off a bit, Cato. The girl has been through a lot, she doesn't want to be around anyone. She trusts Kat, so she's going to stay here with Kat."

Cato was having none of it. "She's going to do what we tell her to, and you are going to do what I tell you to, in case you've forgotten how rank works in this army, Private."

Luckily, before the situation could escalate any further, Katniss arrived with Captain Marvel in tow. "What's going on here? Everdeen said there was a problem."

Cato jumped in to speak before anyone else could. "Yeah, there's a problem. Mellark here has suddenly decided that he's too good to follow orders."

Marvel looked between Cato and Peeta for a moment. Peeta had been with the First for almost two years now, and Marvel knew what kind of soldier he was. Quiet, but reliable. Certainly not one to flaunt orders without reason. "What's the problem here, Mellark?"

"We've got a girl here, she's had a rough time. She doesn't like being around people, makes her panic. Took us half an hour just to get her to come down out of the tree. She trusts Thresh over there, and she trusts Kat, and she'll tolerate me. So the four of us are gonna set here a while and try to keep her calm, and keep her in sight."

Marvel considered this. "You can't stay out here forever, you'll have to come back to camp at night."

"We can set up at the edge of camp, where we can stay off to ourselves," Katniss suggested. "But we can't do that immediately. You've got to let us work at our own pace, if we push her too fast she'll run away again and we'll be right back where we started."

Marvel nodded his head. "Okay. As long as you're in camp by nightfall, I don't have an issue with it."

Katniss breathed a sigh of relief. "Thanks, Captain."

"So what's the problem?" Marvel asked.

"Lieutenant Cato didn't like our plan," Peeta supplied.

Marvel turned a questioning look at Cato. "Sir, we're supposed to round up all the Negroes at the barn," Cato said.

Marvel looked amused. "Surely this little girl being here doesn't pose a threat, Lieutenant?"

"_He_ might," Cato glowered.

"Thresh won't be a problem," Peeta said. "He's just worried about the girl. As long as she's okay, he won't give us any trouble."

Marvel thought for a moment before nodding. "Mellark can keep an eye on him. Everdeen can keep her calm. I don't see a problem with it."

"But Sir, the count-" Cato began before Marvel cut him off.

Marvel pointed at Thresh and Rue in succession. "One, two. There's two slaves here with Everdeen and Mellark. Think you can keep that partial count in your head before counting the rest of them at the barn? Or do you need to write it down?"

Cato's face flushed with anger, but he kept his voice even. "No, Sir. I can remember it."

"Good," Marvel said. "Then why don't you go continue the count and leave these four alone?"

Marvel wasn't a bad sort overall, and Katniss and Peeta couldn't help but like him a bit more every time they saw him needling Cato like this. Cato grumbled out a quick "Yes, sir," before stalking away.

Marvel turned back to Peeta and Katniss. "You better keep those two under control. I don't want to have any reason for regretting this."

Peeta replied quickly, afraid of what Katniss might say. "There won't be any problem, Captain. Like I said, as long as we keep the girl away from other people, we'll be fine."

"Okay, good. Carry on," Marvel said, and turned to leave.

Katniss and Peeta exchanged a look. That had gone about as well as they could have hoped.

…..

_So that's Chapter Two. This was originally supposed to be a bit longer, but some of the later Rue and Thresh scenes are really kicking my ass, so I ended this chapter here so I could finally post an update. Chapter Three will include the rest of the day with Rue and Thresh, and a close encounter at Gettysburg._


	3. Chapter 3

_May 12, 1863 (continued)_

They all spent several hours under the tree together, getting used to one another, getting a feel for one another. Rue was gradually able to relax in Peeta's presence, and she seemed to take a real liking to Katniss. Thresh remained wary and generally quiet, unsure about the two Yankee soldiers who had suddenly thrust themselves into his and Rue's lives, but certainly preferring them to the arrogant Lieutenant Cato or the indifferent Captain Marvel. Peeta spent the whole afternoon on eggshells, his primary goal being to not frighten Rue. This left Katniss with the task of carrying most of the conversation and trying to build a real rapport with the younger girl. She tried hard not to roll her eyes at the situation; somehow they found themselves in a circumstance where Peeta had to stay quiet and Katniss had to do the talking.

To Katniss and Peeta's surprise, what really earned them some trust was when they told Thresh and Rue stories of the hardships they had faced in their lives. Rue and Thresh seemed to have the impression that white folks up north lived in some kind of technological paradise, where nobody suffered and steam-powered machines did all the work. As they were disabused of this notion, their mistrust lessened. Rue's eyes were wide as Katniss described conditions for coal miners in Panem, as she described starving after her father died and her struggles to support her family since then.

Eventually they turned to Peeta, who tried to beg off. "I'm sorry, I don't have any dramatic tales of suffering like Katniss does."

"What do you do back home?" Rue asked him. After hearing Katniss's stories, her curiosity was overwhelming her nerves.

"My family owns the town bakery," Peeta explained. "We all worked there, my parents and my brothers and me. Don't get me wrong, it's hard work – we have to start work at four in the morning to have bread ready for the morning rush, and I've got plenty of burn scars from the ovens, and hundred-pound sacks of flour don't move themselves. But unlike a lot of the miners, we always have enough to eat. Most of it is three-days stale and the only reason we get to eat it is because it's unfit for customers, but there's always enough."

"Peeta," Katniss interjected, "tell them about your mother."

Peeta's calm, easygoing demeanor faltered. It was just a moment, but it was enough that all three of his companions saw it. Peeta coughed nervously, his eyes focused on a spot on the ground near his feet. "Katniss…"

"I know you don't like talking about it," Katniss said, hoping it would suffice as apology for bringing up such a touchy subject. "But I really think it'll help us all relate to each other."

Peeta didn't say anything in response. He picked up a stick and began poking at the spot on the ground which was so suddenly captivating. Thresh and Rue looked back and forth between them, unsure what to do. After a few tense moments, Katniss spoke up again. "Okay, I'll talk," she said, drawing Rue and Thresh's attention back to her. "I have another story to share."

She paused to collect her thoughts. She had never discussed this before, not even with Gale. But the connection she felt with Rue because she reminded her of Prim, and the connection she felt with Peeta for reasons she wasn't willing to think about too closely, made her want them to relate to each other. So she began telling her story. "It was during the worst time. My father had just died and my mother was off in her own world. The mine company paid us out a death benefit of less than a hundred dollars, and with my mother useless that was all we had to live on. We scrimped and we scraped and we made that money last us for the rest of the winter, but by the spring we were running out. I started selling our belongings to try to make some money, but we never had much to begin with."

Rue watched Katniss with rapt attention, her eyes wide. With all of the horror Snow had inflicted on her, he had at least fed her. She had never worried about starving. And even with everything she had been through in her life, she had always had people who helped her deal with it all. She had her Mama, and she had Thresh. She had never truly been on her own.

Thresh stared at Katniss and once again revised his assessment of the petite woman buried in her soldier's clothes. Peeta had compared her inner strength to Rue's earlier, and as she shared more of her experiences Thresh was starting to understand what he meant. The two women, who at first glance couldn't have been more different, were at their cores more similar than Thresh would have thought. Both always enduring, always surviving.

Peeta just kept digging into the ground with his stick, because he was almost certain he knew what story Katniss was about to tell.

"Once we ran out of money and ran out of things to sell, we just ran out. Panem isn't exactly well-off to begin with, there's no charity for a pair of starving miner's kids."

Katniss glanced to Peeta, and was surprised at the intensity of his gaze. Was he thinking of the same thing she was? Did he know where starving girls went in Panem? Who would offer them a handful of coins, and why? Did he know about Reverend Cray?

Katniss shook her head to clear her thoughts, and continued her story. "One day it was pouring rain, one of those ice-cold late-winter rainstorms that just leeches the heat right out of your bones. I had been out trying to sell some of my sister's old baby clothes, but nobody was interested. I was so hungry. I was so weak that when I dropped the clothes in the mud I didn't even try to pick them up, because if I bent over I wasn't sure if I could stand up again. Besides, nobody wanted those clothes, there was no way they could help feed us so they weren't worth carrying anymore anyway."

Katniss found herself mirroring Peeta's fascination with the ground. She didn't want to see how her companions were reacting to her story, didn't want to see the pity in their eyes. Still, she kept talking. "Eventually I resorted to digging through people's trash, looking for anything I could bring home to Prim. Just the thought of her sad eyes, her sunken cheeks…" She paused, taking a moment to compose herself. Even the memory of seeing Prim suffer was too much for her sometimes. "I couldn't go home and face her empty-handed again. I just couldn't. So I was digging through the trash behind the bakery when the baker's wife caught me."

"The baker's wife?" Rue repeated, turning to Peeta. "Is that your mother?"

"Yeah," Peeta said flatly.

"Did she help you?" Rue asked Katniss, looking hopeful.

"No. She yelled at me to get away, and she threatened to call the sheriff and have me arrested for stealing."

Rue looked back at Peeta in surprise. Peeta seemed like a good person, and Katniss had spoken so well of him. "Your mother did that?"

"My mother is not a nice person," Peeta said with a sigh, his eyes never leaving the ground.

"Your mother is an evil witch," Katniss said before she could stop herself.

Peeta just sighed again. "I'm not going to argue."

Rue turned back to Katniss, still trying to process this new information. "What did you do?"

"I stumbled away as best as I could, cause the last thing I wanted was to get the sheriff involved. If he knew how bad off my sister and I were, he would probably take us away from our mother and send us to an orphanage in the city. A place like that would've crushed Prim like a bug." Katniss's voice caught a bit on the idea of Prim in a city orphanage, and it was a moment before she could continue.

"So I did my best to leave, except I was so tired and so weak and so cold that I didn't make it far. I got past the pen where they kept their pig, but then I came to an apple tree at the edge of their property and I just couldn't do it any more. I just fell in a heap against the tree, and I couldn't get back up."

Katniss's eyes began tearing up at the memory of her weakness, and if anyone had been paying attention to Peeta they would have noticed that his stick had stilled its attacks on the ground and his eyes were brimming as well.

"I gave up," Katniss continued, her voice wavering ever so slightly. "I was beaten. The circumstance had defeated me, and I was willing to accept defeat. I accepted that I was about to die, and that Prim would die, and that in all likelihood my mother would die; that I had failed myself and I had failed both of them and I had failed my father too. I failed to take care of my family. I sat there in the rain and I waited for death."

Rue sat enraptured, watching intently as a single tear escaped and made its way down Katniss's cheek, and she wiped it away so quickly that it might have been acid burning her skin. Rue surprised herself by how much Katniss's story was affecting her. She was normally slow to trust new people, her life had taught her to be wary. But somehow this woman soldier had made a connection to her in only a few hours, and now even with the grown Katniss sitting right next to her the idea of young Katniss being near death sent a painful churning through her gut. She had a million questions she wanted to ask, but she didn't dare interrupt Katniss's story.

"Just as I was about to close my eyes and let myself pass out, I heard a clatter in the bakery, and I heard Peeta's mother screaming again, and then I saw the back door open."

Katniss smiled slightly. "I looked up and I saw a blond-haired boy my age, stumbling through the muddy ground behind the bakery. He was carrying two loaves of bread that had been burned, and his mother was yelling at him, berating him for burning the bread. She told him to throw it to the pigs, because no one would want burned bread. Then she went back inside."

Rue and Thresh both glanced over to Peeta, making the obvious connection between the man before them and the boy from Katniss's story.

"I had seen the boy in the bakery before, I knew he was one of the baker's sons, although I didn't know his name at the time. And I had seen him with bruises before, I assumed they came from accidents during the baking work. All the baker's sons appeared bruised from time to time, but the youngest was the worst. I assumed it was because he was the youngest and so he was the clumsiest, or the weakest, or the least experienced, or the most of whatever quality was contributing to the baker's sons hurting themselves all the time. But the bright red weal on the boy's face that night wasn't any normal bruise, it was a fresh wound, and I immediately connected it to the commotion I had heard form the bakery earlier. This boy had burnt some bread, and in response his mother had hit him in the face with – what? A spoon? An oven pan? Her fist?"

"A rolling pin," Peeta said quietly, his eyes never leaving the ground. "That night it was a rolling pin."

Katniss nodded slightly, adding this detail to the memory she replayed in her head so often. "This boy had burned some bread, and in response his mother had hit him in the face with a rolling pin. And berated him as worthless, and useless. And even though I was about to die, I felt bad about how I had misjudged the boy. He had both his parents and he never worried about starving, but he had far from the charmed life I had imagined. But nothing could have prepared me for what he did next."

Rue glanced over at Peeta, dread pooling in her stomach. What role did he play in this story? Did he yell at Katniss as his mother had? Did he chase her off like she was some cretin? The experiences of Rue's young life had taught her to expect the worst from people; she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Thresh looked over to Peeta. He could tell that Rue was nervous about what Katniss was about to tell them about him, but Thresh felt confident that this story had a happy ending. Otherwise the two of them wouldn't be as close as they were now. Instead, Thresh appraised Peeta's physical capabilities. The young soldier wasn't as big or as strong as Thresh himself, but he was no slouch. He could certainly defend himself against his mother, and probably could have since he was ten. Of course, Thresh could have physically defended himself against Snow too, but that wouldn't have done anyone any good.

Katniss continued. "As soon as his mother was gone, the boy abandoned all pretense of walking toward the pig and instead came straight over to where I was hunched against the tree. He picked me up and got me standing again – I don't think I could have done it on my own – and then he shoved the two loaves of bread into my hands. I just stood there, too dumbfounded to react at all. We were both silent for a moment, and then the boy said something that I didn't understand until many years later. He said, 'Don't think of it as charity, just take them and go before my mother comes back out here.' Then he turned me around and shoved me on my way so hard that I almost fell again, but I managed to stumble away, and somehow made it all the way home before I collapsed from exhaustion."

Rue let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. Peeta saved Katniss's life! He saved her from starving, saved her from giving up, and saved her from his mother. She looked back to Peeta, who still had his head down, as if the entire thing embarrassed him.

"When I finally let myself fall into one of the kitchen chairs, and dropped my load of wet, burnt bread onto the table, my sister's face lit up like I hadn't seen since our father died. I had to constantly slow her to keep her from just inhaling the bread and making herself sick, and even so we ate an entire loaf for dinner that night. Once we pulled the blackened bits off the outside, the whole inside of the loaves was fine really. It wasn't even wet from the rain, the burnt shell had protected it from most of the water. It was delicious, fresh from the oven bakery bread, good hearty bread filled with raisins and nuts. The perfect bread to make a meal out of."

Katniss allowed herself a smile, remembering that night. How Prim seemed to come alive with each bite. How even her mother had come to the table to share the meal with them. "My family was going to survive another day. Heck, we could survive a week on that much bread. It was a miracle."

Rue had a question in her mind, and in the next moment Katniss voiced it herself. "It didn't even occur to me until the next morning that the boy might have burned the bread on purpose. That he might have dropped those loaves into the flames, knowing it meant being beaten, just so he could have an excuse to give them to me. I wanted to dismiss the idea, but the fact that he came straight to me and practically shoved them into my hands certainly suggested he wasn't acting on a spur of the moment whim. But I didn't understand why he would do such a thing, knowing that he would be in for an even worse beating if he was discovered."

Rue wanted to ask Peeta right now why he had done it, but again she held her tongue for fear of interrupting Katniss's story. "It was while I was thinking about everything that next morning that I realized that this boy had done me this enormous kindness, had saved the lives of my entire family, and I hadn't even thanked him. There was no way I could ever repay all he had done for me with that one gesture, but I was determined to at least thank him. So that day I went straight back to the bakery, determined to walk in there and thank the boy. But when I got there, I looked through the front window and saw his mother behind the counter, and I froze. I hid around the corner behind the shoemaker's, because the last thing I wanted was for her to see me there again."

"It's a good thing you didn't come in that day," Peeta said, surprising everyone with his interruption. "Mr. Rooba the butcher was there that morning complaining about someone overturning his trash bins the day before."

"That wasn't me," Katniss said. "The butcher's trash was already picked clean by the time I got there."

Peeta just shrugged. "Well, he told Mom about his trash, and she told him about you, and the two of them spent about fifteen minutes complaining about 'degenerate coalminer vermin.' So that morning would have been a bad time for you to show up at the bakery."

Katniss didn't have any response for that, so she continued her story. "I waited there for a while, trying to figure out what to do, and eventually I saw the boy in the bakery, filling a shelf with some fresh loaves of bread. The red weal on his cheek had swollen and looked painful, and his eye had blackened as well. As he was finishing up whatever he was doing, he happened to look out the front window, and he saw me watching him. We stood frozen like that, staring at each other through the window, for I don't know how long. Finally I looked away, I glanced down at the ground where I was standing, and I saw a dandelion. The first dandelion of the year. And as soon as I saw it, it was like a bell went off in my head. I thought of all the hours I spent in the woods with my father, all the years he spent teaching me how to hunt, teaching me what plants were edible and which ones weren't. Suddenly I knew how we were going to survive. I knew how I was going to support my family. I bent over and picked the dandelion, and when I looked up the boy was still watching me. We exchanged another look before he went back to his work and I went back home."

"I always wondered if it was something like that," Peeta interrupted again, finally lifting his eyes to look at Katniss. "I remember the look on your face, you looked down at that flower and it was like the entire world was opening up before your eyes. And it was only a few weeks after that that you started showing up at our back door with fresh game."

"It was like seeing a whole new world," Katniss said, returning his gaze. "The day before I was ready to die, and suddenly I had not only a reprieve, but a way forward. And to this day it's still all connected in my head: The bread that saved my life, the dandelion that gave me hope, and the boy who was responsible for all of it."

Everyone was quiet for a moment, as Katniss and Peeta continued staring at one another. Finally Rue asked, "So did you ever get to thank him properly?"

"Not for many years," Katniss said. "I would see him from time to time, but we never acknowledged that night. Not once. We never discussed it until I snuck into the army and we wound up in the same company, and he saved me again by not turning me in."

Nobody quite knew what to say after that. After a few minutes of silence, Rue surprised everyone by getting up and walking over to Peeta. She sat directly in front of him, and looked him straight in the eye. Nobody said anything, waiting to see what the girl was doing. She almost seemed to be studying the young man, who did his best to return her gaze without seeming challenging or intimidating. After another few minutes, Rue finally spoke. "You shouldn't be embarrassed because your mother hit you," she told him. "You're a good person."

"Thanks, Rue," Peeta said, unsure of how to respond.

Rue's gaze shifted away as she spoke again. "I used to feel ashamed because of what those men did to me. Sometimes I still do."

"But none of that was your fault," Peeta said emphatically. "You can't get down on yourself because of what other people do."

Rue smiled slightly as she looked him in the eye once more. "You're right. You can't."

Peeta shook his head at the younger girl. "You're way too clever for me, Rue."

Rue sat silently for another minute. She cocked her head slightly, as if she were trying to see Peeta from another angle. After a while, she seemed to nod to herself, then she got up and returned to her previous spot by Katniss and Thresh, both of whom continued to hold their tongues and wait for some explanation from Rue. She offered none, however, instead telling the group a story about Chaff, an older slave whose hand was amputated as punishment after an escape attempt, who wound up working in Snow's rose gardens since he couldn't do field work with one hand. Katniss and Peeta had to admit, the rose garden on the property was very impressive.

By the time sunset was approaching, Rue agreed to move to the army encampment. The four set themselves up at the edge of camp, and Finnick and Caesar made sure the rest of the company knew to leave them alone tonight. As the last of the day's light disappeared behind the horizon, Katniss, Peeta, Thresh, and Rue were huddled around their fire, enjoying some of the food the First had found stored on the property. Rue even sat through a brief examination by Doc Aurelius. They told a few more stories around the fire before they all bedded down for the night.

It was several hours later when the sound of someone approaching caused Peeta to stir in his sleep. He looked up just in time to see Rue seat herself right beside him.

"Rue?" he asked groggily as he sat up to face her.

The girl was quiet for a long time before answering. "What's it like to be in love?" she finally asked.

"Wha...?" Peeta was pretty sure that question would have stumped him even if he wasn't still half asleep.

"You love Katniss," she said. "That's why you gave her that bread." It wasn't a question, and Peeta didn't bother trying to deny it.

"I said you were too clever for me. Am I that obvious?"

"I don't know. It seemed kind of obvious to me."

Peeta laughed lightly. "I've been helping her hide the fact that she's a woman from the army for almost a year, but I couldn't hide the fact that I love her from you for an afternoon. Thank god Marvel and Cato aren't as smart as you."

"So what's it like?" Rue repeated.

Peeta thought for a moment. "You mean how did I know?"

"No, I mean, what does it feel like?" she said. "I've never been in love. I just want to know what it's like," she explained, her voice growing smaller and less confident as she continued.

Peeta wanted to tell her that she was too young to be in love, but he knew that assertion would fall on deaf ears. Rue had been forced to grow up too young just to survive. Just like Katniss. Just like him.

He stopped and thought before trying to answer her. "Being in love... it's like I've found something I didn't know I'd been missing all my life. Like my head is filled with questions I never thought to ask before, and the answer to every one of them is her. I feel like my life has a purpose, that I have a reason for living, and that reason is her. She's the reason behind almost everything I do, to the point where I don't even remember why I did things before her. I live for her, and if I had to I'd die for her, with no regrets."

Rue stared at something in the distance, taking time to digest his words. "I wish someone felt that way about me."

"I'm sure someone will, one day," Peeta said. "You're still young, Rue. You have time to find someone."

"None of the men I was with thought I was too young," Rue said bitterly.

"And why should we trust their opinion on anything?" Peeta asked. "No matter what has happened to you, you're still only 14. You have plenty of years ahead of you to find love."

"What if I never find it?" Rue asked. "What if no man will have me because I've been spoiled?"

"If he really loves you, that won't matter to him."

"How could it not matter?" Rue asked, a tinge of sadness entering her voice. "Isn't that important to men? Aren't wives supposed to be pure on their wedding night?"

"Rue, there's a big difference between what's 'supposed to be' and what actually is. In a perfect world, if everyone lived ideal lives, then yes, everyone would be pure on their wedding night and everyone would only ever be with their spouse. But we don't live in a perfect world. We don't live ideal lives. Far from it. We live in a world filled with imperfections. That's part of what love is. Loving someone despite everything that's wrong with them. Loving someone because of everything that's wrong with them."

Rue's brow knit in confusion. "How can you love someone because of what's wrong with them?"

Peeta opened his mouth to reply, but had to pause for a moment, struggling to put his thoughts into words. Finally, he said, "I love Katniss's scowl." Rue gave him a skeptical look. "I do! I love the way her eyes seem to get closer together whenever she scowls. I love the intense look she gives you when she's really starting to get angry, with her gray eyes it's like two storm clouds are boring into your soul. I love the way her lips curve down at the end, just ever so slightly, but only on one side of her mouth. Every time I see it I want to kiss her on that spot." He paused to think for a moment. "I love that she's so guarded around most people, because it shows how much she trusts the few people she's more open with. I love that she's so short-tempered, because it shows how much she cares."

Rue examined the young soldier for a moment. "Wow, you really are a goner."

Peeta sighed lightly. "Yeah."

"And if Katniss had been sold to other men like I was, that wouldn't change things? You wouldn't care?"

Peeta jerked his head at her last question. "Of course I'd care," he said angrily, just the thought of Katniss suffering like that filling him with rage. Rue misinterpreted his words and his anger, and had a moment of despondency before Peeta continued speaking. "I'd want to find every one of those men and cut their balls off. I'd want to beat them to death with my bare hands." Peeta closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. "But it wouldn't change how I feel about Katniss."

"You're a good man, Peeta," Rue told him. "I wish there were more men out there like you."

"There are," he assured her. "Rue, you've experienced some of the worst that humanity has to offer. There's no denying that. But that doesn't mean that the best isn't still out there, just waiting for you. Just look at today. Katniss chased you up a tree and sang to you. She told you and Thresh the truth about her, gave you the power to ruin her life and trusted you not to. That's how much she cared about you before you'd even properly met. Thresh was faced with an army full of white men with guns telling him to go to the barn and eat, but instead he ignored the chance for a feast and defied the army to stay and watch out for you. Good people do good things, every single day. And I know you'll experience that now. You have a chance for a whole new life now. A long, happy life, filled with nothing but good things."

"You're just trying to make me feel better," Rue said accusingly.

"Is it working?"

Rue smiled for the first time that night. "Maybe a little."

Peeta smiled back at her. "Good. You deserve to feel better. You deserve a long, happy life, filled with joy and love. And trust me, one day you'll meet a man who will bring that love into your life. You'll know you love him when you're not afraid to tell him your story, and you'll know he loves you when hearing it only males him hug you tighter. And maybe start compiling a list of men he wants to hunt down and cut the balls off of," he added with a grin, actually managing to draw a laugh from the girl.

"Well," she said, "I did promise a friend that I would try to trust you."

"Well, trust me on this," Peeta said, "you're going to feel awful tomorrow if you don't get some sleep tonight."

Rue smiled and agreed, and got up to return to sleep. Peeta laid back down as well, and soon both were dozing easily, their rest calm and peaceful. The only one left awake was Katniss, her mind spinning as she tried to absorb everything she had just heard Peeta say about her.

…..

_It's a (not too long after) Christmas miracle! I finally got an update out! Man-oh-Manischewitz, this chapter kicked my ass. It took me forever to figure out a way to get Rue and Thresh to where I wanted them to be at the end of their time with K&P, which now won't even happen until the next chapter since this wound up being so long._

_I never had any intention of recounting the bread story in this story until I was about three sentences into typing it. It just sort of came out that way, but I think it works here. _

_Next chapter, Rue and Thresh finally part ways with Katniss and Peeta, and we finally get to the long-promised encounter at Gettysburg._


	4. Chapter 4

_May 13, 1863_

Katniss spent most of the night awake, and for once it wasn't because of nightmares. Peeta's words kept repeating themselves in her head. She couldn't make them stop.

She had known, in an abstract way, that Peeta loved her. He had told her, once, in passing, last year. And certainly his actions had hinted at the fact. But she had never actually heard him express his love, never heard him talk about _how_ he loved her, _why_ he loved her. How he wanted to kiss her. How he would die for her. He would _die_ for her.

He never spoke of it because he knew it would disturb her, and he was right, because now that she had heard it she was definitely disturbed.

Katniss had no experience with love. Of course she loved Prim, and in a way she loved her mother, and even Gale and the Hawthornes. But this kind of love, romantic love, she had never felt. She had never let herself love anyone. She had had one example of love in her life: her parents. Her parents had loved each other deeply. They had shared the kind of love that you read about in storybooks and fairy tales. And it had almost killed her, because when her father died, her mother fell apart. Maybe if her parents had not loved each other quite so fiercely, then her mother would have been able to deal with her father's death. Maybe her mother would have been able to support the family. Maybe the responsibility for the family's survival wouldn't have rested on the shoulders of an eleven-year-old girl.

Love had almost killed her. And yet, love had saved her as well. She harbored no illusions as to why Peeta had given her that bread that day, about what exactly had motivated him to take a beating from his mother just for the opportunity to help her. Peeta's love for her had saved her from the disastrous consequences of her mother's love for her father.

It was all too much for her. It was too much to figure out, too many conflicting emotions to sort through. Everything about her current situation conflicted with itself, and it left her head spinning. _My name is Katniss Everdeen. My name is Kat Everdeen. I'm a hunter. I'm a soldier. I love my father. My father is dead. Love almost killed me. Love saved me. I only ever sing for Prim. I sang for Rue. I owe Peeta my life. Peeta insists I don't owe him anything. Peeta keeps me sane. Peeta is driving me crazy. _

_Peeta loves me. And I... I..._

That was the problem, right there. If she could finish that last sentence, then everything else would fall into place. The problem was, she couldn't. She _couldn't_.

What was wrong with her, anyway? She was in a war. She was here to support Prim, the only person in the world she was certain she loved. She regularly spent her days furiously trying to kill people before they killed her. She didn't have time to worry about _romance_. Love had never been a consideration for her before, and it shouldn't be now. Love was a distraction she couldn't afford.

She had almost convinced herself of this as she sat in a grassy field outside of camp, watching the impending sunrise erase the sky full of stars. She was so immersed in the quiet and the solitude and the beauty of the heavens that she almost jumped out of her skin when she heard footsteps approaching her.

She wasn't surprised at all when it was Peeta who plopped down next to her. "Couldn't sleep either?" he asked her.

"Couldn't turn my mind off," she said.

They didn't speak as they watched the sunrise together, both knowing that they would have to start their day soon enough but neither of them ready to do so quite yet. Unsurprisingly it was Peeta who broke the silence. "That's my favorite color," he said. Katniss replied with nothing but a questioning look. "The orange in sunrises and sunsets," he explained with a nod towards the horizon. "It's beautiful."

Katniss considered the sky before her. As many sunrises and sunsets as she had seen in the woods around Panem, she had never thought to analyze the colors they painted in the sky. Now that she really looked, she had to agree with him. It was beautiful.

"Mine's green," she said. "Like the forest."

Peeta nodded again. "Yeah, I can see that."

The quiet reigned once more following their short exchange. Finally, Peeta spoke.

"You were awake when I was talking to Rue last night, weren't you?"

Katniss didn't turn to look at him. "Yeah," she said.

"I'm sorry if I upset you."

Katniss almost laughed. It was so like Peeta to apologize for things he said in what was supposed to be a private conversation, things she only overheard by eavesdropping. "You didn't do anything wrong. You were just telling the truth, right?"

"Just cause it's the truth doesn't mean it can't be upsetting," he said.

"I'm fine," she insisted, as much to herself as to him.

Peeta made a noncommittal grunt in reply, finally prompting Katniss to look over to him. "You don't have to pretend with me, Katniss," he told her. His use of her real name acted as a signal of sorts, letting her know that he wasn't talking about the war, or their current roles as soldiers. That they were taking a time-out from all of that, that this was just Peeta the baker's son talking to Katniss the huntress. "Even if you're trying to lie to yourself, you never have to do that with me."

Katniss had no idea how to respond to that, so she didn't. Instead she told him honestly, "I just can't deal with this right now."

"I'm not asking you to," he answered quickly, but then seemed to stop himself and rethink his words. "I'm trying so hard, every day, to not make this weird for you. To not overwhelm you with my issues. To be a help to you without burdening you with my desires."

"You are a help to me," she insisted. "I never would have made it past Antietam if it wasn't for you. I'd never make it through the night if not for you."

She could see the ghost of a smile her words brought to his face. "I'm glad. I just hope you don't feel like I'm… demanding anything of you, or placing any burden on you, because of how I feel. We don't have to be anything more than friends right now."

Friends. She could handle friends, right? Isn't that the name for what they were becoming? Isn't that what she had told Rue they were?

She thought for a moment of Rue. She had thought yesterday in the tree that Rue might force her to confront her scattered thinking about her relationship with Peeta, and that had certainly become the case. There was no way she felt ready to confront the totality of his feelings, but this much she felt okay with.

"I think I could handle friends."

Peeta allowed himself a small smile. "So you'll let me be your friend?"

Katniss smiled back at him. "I'll allow it."

Peeta smiled wider. "Well, as your friend, I have to say this." He leaned forward slightly, as if he were about to share a secret. "I don't like the way that Mellark guy looks at you. I'd watch out for him. You know what guys like _that_ are like."

Katniss couldn't stifle her laughter at Peeta's mock warning. Soon Peeta joined with a chuckle of his own. All the tension of the morning seemed to be melting away.

The sun was fully risen now. Peeta stood and held a hand out. "Come on, Kat. Everyone will be up soon."

_Kat_. Time-out over. Back to the act they had to maintain in front of everyone else. But when she took his offered hand and stood, as they made their way back to camp, they didn't let go of each other's hands. For the briefest of moments, with the camp hidden behind a rise in the landscape and the new day dawning behind them, they were just two people, all alone, holding hands.

…..

"Do you have any plans?" Peeta asked as they were packing up their camp after breakfast. "Anywhere to go?"

Rue looked to Thresh to answer him. Though none of them had spoken of it, it was assumed by all four of them that wherever Thresh went, Rue would follow. "Nope," the large man answered. "Never known anything but slavery. But we sure as hell don't want to stay around here." With no better options, that's what most of the slaves planned to do, keep working the plantation but without masters and overseers. Thresh had no interest in that, but he really didn't have any idea where else they could go.

Katniss spoke up without thinking. "If you want, you could go to Panem. I know some people who can help you."

For a moment they all looked at each other. They were all shocked that she would suggest such a thing, including Katniss herself. Who was she to determine the next step in two people's lives? Two people she had known for less than a day, two people tasting freedom for the first time, certainly didn't need her deciding where they should live.

But then she looked at Rue. Once she got over her initial surprise, Rue was genuinely excited about the idea. There were relatively few people she truly trusted. She had Thresh. Her mama was probably still on their old plantation, but no way was she going into the Confederacy looking for her. But in Panem, at the least there would be Katniss's family. She could meet Prim. And she could know Katniss after the war. With literally no better ideas, she found herself eager to accept Katniss's impromptu offer.

Thresh tried to beg off. "You said you joined the army to support your family. We can't take from them if you're going so far just for them to get by."

Katniss shook her head. "I wasn't talking about my family. They'll help you any way they can, of course, but you're right, they can't afford to be enough help on their own. You want to go see the Undersees."

Hannah and Mayor Undersee were the heads of a prominent Quaker family in Panem. Katniss was friendly with their daughter, Madge, whom she had met at Miss Trinket's school. Everyone in town knew the Undersees because Mayor Undersee, even though he was just a man named Mayor and not an actual elected official, was often treated like one anyway. He represented Panem at the county seat, and was often asked to settle disputes between citizens. What most people didn't know was that for years the Undersees had operated a station on the Underground Railroad, helping fugitive slaves escape to freedom. Katniss knew, because when the Undersees needed meat to feed their guests but didn't want to have to explain to the butcher why they needed so much extra food, they went to Katniss to hunt them some game. With the war on, fugitive slaves were no longer hunted in Pennsylvania, but Katniss was confident that the Undersees would still be willing to help people in need.

After some further discussion, the combination of Rue's interest and the lack of other options lead Thresh to accept Katniss's idea. They obtained a Pennsylvania map from Captain Marvel, and Katniss wrote them letters of introduction to Prim and Madge while Peeta and Rue worked on packing them a knapsack full of food for their journey.

Soon it was time to leave. Thresh shook the hands of both Katniss and Peeta. Rue gave Katniss a hug, then surprised everyone by doing the same to Peeta, who very gingerly returned the embrace. "Take care, Rue," he told the young girl, "and remember what we talked about."

Rue nodded back at him. "I will."

Soon enough it was mid-day and time to depart, the army company further south into Virginia, Thresh and Rue north into Pennsylvania, each headed where they had never ventured before.

…..

_July 7, 1863_

"Mellark?"

Peeta was laying on the floor of the library of someone's home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His head was resting on two books as he read a third.

The tiny town of Gettysburg was still struggling to handle the onslaught of wounded men produced by the battle the week before. Thus why there were a dozen of them calling the floor of this library home. Peeta himself had taken a very nasty bayonet wound to the upper thigh during fierce fighting in the third day of the battle. It was a deep wound, and very prone to infection, but Doc Aurelius had said he could prevent infection by washing carefully. He washed the wound, his hands, the needle, and even the thread with a harsh lye soap before he stitched and bandaged the wound, and Peeta had made a point of washing the wound at least every day since then. Katniss had tried to help, but the position of the wound – high up on the inside of his thigh – made her blush red from embarrassment.

Katniss. They had an odd relationship, to say the least. He loved her, and what's more she now knew he loved her, even if she had doubted him at first she couldn't any longer. In the months since their conversation at the Snow Estate they had grown closer, more at ease with each other. She had actually begun to open up to him. He would count her as his closest friend, without a doubt. And every so often she would give him a look, or a smile, or a touch, that suggested that they could possibly be more one day. Peeta refused to push things, he knew that would end in disaster, but he had hope for the future. And in this war, hope for the future was a very powerful thing.

They had to be careful, though. As far as the rest of the company was concerned, Kat Everdeen was a young boy, and he was getting younger every day to explain why he hadn't hit puberty yet. When Kat had arrived last year he had been said to be 14. Now that it was a year later and his voice still hadn't changed, he was still 14, having arrived last year at the tender age of 13. The ruse wouldn't last if the war went on much longer.

They had to remember to be very careful how they treated each other in public. They had become more and more comfortable with each other in the privacy of their tent, especially at night when the nightmares hit. But in public they weren't a 19-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman, they were a 19-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy. They knew there were rumors about them, they knew that more than a few soldiers thought they were sodomites. Peeta did his best to play their public relationship as him treating Kat affectionately like a kid brother, and folks like Colonel Abernathy, Captain Odair, Sergeant Caesar, and Doc Aurelius always had their backs. Doc knew about Katniss, of course, and Peeta thought that Haymitch and Finnick at least suspected something, but they trusted each other and nobody ever said anything.

Katniss lay next to him on the floor. She had a gash on her forehead from a bayonet that both she and Doc Aurelius tried to reassure him was not as bad as it looked, and also a nasty burn wound on her leg from an exploding mortar. The leg wound especially made them thankful that they had Doc Aurelius to treat her in confidence; another doctor examining her that closely could easily have discovered her true gender.

Peeta spared a quick glance at Katniss before responding to the speaker; luckily she was turned on her side away from his view. The combination of her uniform, the thin blanket covering her body, her naturally small frame, and living off army rations for nearly a year successfully hid any body curves that might have given her away. Peeta hoped she was awake and wouldn't accidentally turn over in her sleep as he turned to respond to his unexpected visitor.

"Hello, Gale. Fancy meeting you here."

"What are you doing here, Mellark?"

"Same thing as you," Peeta said, nodding towards the arm Gale had in a sling. "I'm injured. Took a bayonet to the thigh. You?"

"Something in my elbow," Gale said. "Doc just said don't move it for a few weeks. Not sure how he expects me to do that in this army."

Peeta chuckled at him. "Yeah, Doc basically told me don't get off this floor till next week. It hasn't been much fun so far."

There was an awkward moment before Gale spoke again. "Didn't exactly expect to find a merchant in the infantry."

Peeta knew what he meant, but he still wasn't sure how to respond. "Well, surprise."

"How come you're not in the 47th?"

"I was avoiding you."

This answer surprised Gale. "Me, specifically?"

"This conversation," Peeta explained. "This whole merchant-versus-miner thing. It's bad enough at home, I didn't want to have to deal with it when there were bullets flying. I was trying to avoid serving with a bunch of miners who would give me crap about being a merchant in the infantry."

"And how's that working out for you?"

"Pretty good so far. You know, other than the bayonet in the thigh."

Peeta was pleased that his answer actually got a small laugh from Gale. His next question raised his guards, though. "You ever hear from anyone from home?"

"Not since I enlisted, no," Peeta said.

Gale raised his eyebrows at this. "Not even your parents?"

"You know my mother," Peeta said by way of explanation. Even if her abuse of her sons wasn't common knowledge, everyone in Panem knew of the nasty personality of the baker's wife.

Gale was silent for another moment before he continued. "I was just asking because, well, I have this… friend of mine back home. Katniss Everdeen?"

Peeta was careful to keep his face impassive. He only nodded in acknowledgement. "I know her a bit. She trades at the bakery."

Gale eyed him skeptically. "You know her?"

"Well, enough to say 'Hi,' or 'How many squirrels today?'"

Gale seemed to accept this. "I've been writing this whole year, and I haven't heard anything back from her once."

Peeta tried to act as calm as possible. "Maybe she's not much of a letter writer?"

Gale shook his head. "Something's going on, I'm sure of it. I've written my family, and hers, and all they'll tell me is that she's fine, they won't give me any detail. But I had a few of the other guys in the 47th ask their families, and they all say the same thing: None of them have seen Katniss in almost a year. I'd think she was dead, if it wasn't for the reassurances from her family. I know they wouldn't lie to me about that, but something must be up if they won't tell me what's going on with her. I was just hoping maybe you had heard something."

Peeta just shook his head. "Sorry, I haven't heard anything from anyone in Panem since I signed up in '61. Even if I wrote home, they won't know anything more than everyone else in town."

Gale just nodded sadly. "Yeah, that's what I figured. Had to take a shot, though. It's driving me crazy not knowing what happened to her."

Peeta tried to offer him some reassurance. "If Mrs. Everdeen and Prim say she's fine, I'd believe them. Prim doesn't strike me as the type who could lie about anything. And I'm sure your family wouldn't keep you in the dark if something had really happened."

"Yeah, that's what I keep telling myself. Anyway, I should be going. Take care of yourself, Mellark."

"You too, Gale. See you at the next one."

Gale chuckled a little as he walked away. Luckily he didn't look back, or else he would have gotten a clear view of Katniss's distraught face watching him leave. She wanted desperately to talk to him after so long apart, wanted desperately to reassure him, tell him she was indeed fine, tell him not to worry about her. But it was impossible. Instead she stayed as still and as silent as she could as she watched her best friend walk away.

But that just brought up her confused thoughts. She and Peeta had grown closer over the past months, despite every intention of hers. Was Gale even her best friend anymore? She couldn't imagine allowing Gale to hold her and comfort her as she wept after a nightmare. She couldn't imagine sleeping pressed up against Gale in an effort to fight off the terrors together. But then, those weren't exactly things you did with a friend, anyway. But she didn't even want to acknowledge the possibility that she and Peeta could be anything more than friends, certainly not that she might want to be more than friends.

She rolled over to face Peeta, only to find him already staring at her intently. "Thank you for trying to reassure him."

"I didn't want to say anything more, I was afraid of tipping him off."

"No, you couldn't have said anything more. You handled it perfectly. I just wish there was some way I could set his mind at ease. Maybe I could send Prim a letter to forward to him?"

"He'd probably recognize it came from an army post."

She let out a dejected sigh. "Yeah…"

Peeta resisted the urge to reach over and touch her face; there were too many other people in this room. "He'll see you the same time everybody gets to see their family: when the war ends." Katniss didn't say anything in response, just nodded. She lay back down and stared at the ceiling, alone with her thoughts.

On the floor between them, hidden by their overlapped blankets, their hands found each other. Fingers intertwined, palms clasped together, reassuring each other that no matter how bleak it seemed, they weren't alone. Friends did that, right?

...

_Woo new chapter in less than 45 days! We're finally getting back into the materiel I already had written back when this was still going to be a one-shot, so hopefully I'll be able to get chapters out a bit more quickly for now._

_Next chapter: Revelations and unexpected reunions at Petersburg!_


	5. Chapter 5

_November 22, 1864_

They were huddled around the campfire, fighting off the cold together: General Abernathy. Colonel Odair. Captain Caesar. Lieutenants Mellark and Everdeen. All the officers. All the survivors. All the ones who had been there forever. All the old men of the regiment, even though Lieutenant Everdeen was only 14 years old, having fooled the recruiters in '62 at the tender age of 12.

So many were gone. So many dead and mauled in the Overland Campaign last spring. Dalton. Woof. Marvel. Aurelius. But it had seemed to be serving an objective: By June they were within spitting distance of the Confederate capitol of Richmond. All that was needed was to break Bobby Lee's lines at Petersburg and the war would practically be over. They could almost taste it. They could all go home.

But here they were, more than five months later, and no closer to Petersburg. No closer to Richmond. No closer to home.

So here they sat, around the fire, these men who had faced death together, these men who had become closer than family. They didn't say anything to each other, they didn't need to. They sat in companionable silence until a passing soldier from another regiment intruded.

"Excuse me, General Abernathy, sir?"

Haymitch appraised the intruder. "Yes, Sergeant, what is it?"

"I have a message from Colonel Boggs, sir."

As Abernathy read the paper he had been handed, the intruding sergeant scanned the assembled group, until he found a familiar set of gray eyes looking back at him in shock. "Catnip? Is that you? What the hell are you doing here?"

Seemingly oblivious to the house of cards about to collapse around her, Finnick turned to Katniss with one of his obnoxious Finnick grins. "What did he just call you? Catnip?"

Katniss didn't respond. Peeta broke the shocked silence. "Um, guys, this is Gale Hawthorne. He's from Panem, just like Kat and me."

After another uncomfortable silence, Haymitch spoke up. "You may as well sit down and join us, Hawthorne. And try to keep your voice down, we don't need to be advertising her private business to the entire regiment."

Gale gawked at Haymitch for a moment, then sat down roughly. He scowled when he saw how closely Peeta and Katniss were sitting.

Seeing that Katniss was still frozen in terror, Peeta broke the silence again. "Well, I think Caesar is the only one here who still doesn't know the secret."

Caesar smiled widely at him. "What, that sweet little Kat here hasn't really been a 14-year-old boy for the last two years? Give me some credit, Mellark. I may be old but I'm not stupid."

Peeta smiled and shook his head. "Okay, so everybody knows the big secret now. I guess that means we can talk openly."

Gale was angry and terse. "So what are you doing here, Katniss?"

Now that she was reassured that she wasn't about to be court-martialed and sent home, Katniss was returning to normal. Gale's anger only fueled her own, however. "What does it look like, Gale? I'm in the army."

"Well yes, I can see that, but women aren't allowed in the army!"

Katniss just shrugged at him. "That's why, as far as the army's concerned, I'm a boy named Kat."

"Seriously?" Gale asked with disdain. Katniss chose not to respond. Gale looked like he didn't know whether to shout or cry. "Why did you do this?" he asked.

"It was the only way to support Mom and Prim," Katniss explained. "All the trade in town dried up, and I needed a way to make some money. And the army was the only one hiring."

Gale's expression shifted from anger to pain. "Why didn't you tell me what was happening? Do you know how worried I was when people told me you'd disappeared? I had half of Panem looking for you!" He shifted his gaze to Peeta, and his anger was back. "You knew about this, and you lied to my face!"

"I couldn't tell you," Peeta said calmly. "We couldn't tell anybody, we_ can't_ tell anybody. Nobody but our closest comrades has any idea."

"I was there that day, Gale," Katniss spoke up. Gale gave her a questioning look. "When you spoke to Peeta in Gettysburg. I was there, I was right next to him pretending to be asleep. I watched you walk away." Katniss voice caught in her throat for a moment. "I wanted to be able to tell you something, but I knew you'd try to get me sent home."

"I am gonna send you home," Gale confirmed.

"Don't you dare," warned General Abernathy. "Us First Volunteers, we're a close-knit group. Don't cross us. I can make your life miserable in this army."

"If you actually cared about her you'd send her home," Gale said accusingly.

"I care about all of my soldiers," Abernathy countered. "I want to send them all home. And I will, just as soon as we break Bobby Lee and string up old Jeff Davis. Till then, we need every soldier we've got, and Everdeen here is one of my better ones. She'll go home the same time as the rest of us: When the war ends."

Gale turned his gaze back to Peeta. "So you've been helping her this whole time?"

"Helping her maintain cover, sure."

"Who's been covering for the fact that she's not a real soldier?"

"I'm just as much of a real soldier as you are, Gale," Katniss said testily. "I've been here just as long as you have. And apparently I'm better at it than you are, _Sergeant_."

Gale's face twisted in anger. "I can only guess what you did to earn that rank, _Lieutenant_."

Katniss narrowed her eyes. Most smart people began fearing for their lives when they received a look like that from Katniss Everdeen. "Just what exactly are you implying?"

Gale took no notice of her expression. "You've got quite the group of officers keeping your little secret for you," he sneered at her. "How exactly do you get so many men to cover for you? You repay them all on your back, or just Mellark?"

Katniss was on her feet in a second lunging at him, but Peeta was up just as fast, holding her around the waist as she flailed her limbs attempting to get to Gale. It didn't matter anyway, as Haymitch's fist was faster than either of them, spinning Gale from his sitting position and sending him sprawling on the ground. "I'm quite sure that statement was unnecessary," Haymitch said lazily. "Now why don't you apologize for that inconsiderate remark?"

Gale sat back up, rubbing his jaw. He glared up at Katniss, now standing but still being held by Peeta in case she jumped at Gale again. "Sorry."

Katniss glared right back. "I'm sorry, _Sir_."

Gale's face was beet red in anger, but he complied. "I'm sorry, _Sir_."

"Well, this is just entertaining as all get-out," Finnick said, breaking the tense silence. "Are you two cousins or something?"

"No," was all Gale said.

"Best friends," Katniss explained. "At least we used to be."

"'Used to be'?" Gale asked contemptuously.

Katniss glared at him again. "Yeah, used to be. Before you decided that I was sleeping with half my company. Glad to know my _best friend_ thinks so highly of me."

"Yeah, well you don't exactly look uncomfortable with Mellark's hands all over you there, Catnip," Gale said, and it was only then that Peeta and Katniss realized that he was still holding her. They self-consciously separated and sat back down awkwardly. "You tell me how you've survived in the army this long," Gale asked.

Katniss shrugged. "The same way as any other soldier: Hard work and dumb luck."

"But you're not a soldier," Gale countered.

Peeta interrupted their exchange. "For Christ's sake, Gale, you're the one who's hunted with her for years. You of all people should know how prepared she was to fight. Caesar, Finnick, Haymitch, they should have taken convincing. You should have already known."

"They don't let women in the army," Gale said matter-of-factly, "and she's a woman."

"And you're an idiot," Peeta said just as matter-of-factly. "You know how good she is with a weapon. You know how good a shot she is. You know how calm she is under pressure. You know how much endurance she has. You know how smart she is. You know how tenacious and determined she is. If you don't think that those things make her a great soldier, then you're an idiot, and I'm relieved as hell to have her watching my back rather than you."

"Hear, hear!" Finnick and Caesar heartedly endorsed Peeta's impromptu speech. Katniss squirmed slightly, uncomfortable with praise as always, but she had been becoming more and more comfortable hearing it from Peeta. He spent so much time praising her, in big ways and small, he was starting to wear her down, starting to make her believe it. It was one of the things she liked about him, when she allowed herself to admit that there were things she liked about him.

"So what's the deal with you two?" Gale asked suddenly.

"What do you mean?" Peeta asked.

"Like I said, you two look real comfy together. And that would only figure, considering you've been living together for the past two years and all."

Peeta frowned at what he was implying. He was at the same time angry at Gale that he would suggest such a thing about he and Katniss, and also disappointed that it wasn't more true.

Katniss scowled at him. She was angry at the suggestion, and angry at herself for kind of wanting it to be true. Maybe. A little. In a way.

"We're friends," she said, and left it at that.

"Yeah, I'm sure," Gale said.

"What, they don't share tents in your company?" Caesar asked.

"Not with girls!" Gale said emphatically.

"Keep your voice down!" at least three people insisted at the same time.

Silence reigned for another bit until Gale spoke up again. "So everyone buys that you're a guy named Kat Everdeen?"

"They buy it enough that nobody asks questions," Katniss said. "If I was incompetent, or if I wasn't pulling my own load, or if I was an asshole, then maybe folks would be looking at me harder. But as it is, to whatever extent they suspect, nobody cares enough to make a big deal."

Gale just shakes his head. "I can't believe you. Don't you know how dangerous this is?"

"Remember who you're talking to, Gale," Katniss said tersely. "I've been here just as long as you. Fought in just as many battles. I was at Antietam. I was at Gettysburg. I was at Cold Harbor."

"How can you see all of that and still stay here?" Gale asked. "Why don't you go home?"

"Why don't _you_ go home?" Katniss asked forcefully. She shook off Peeta's attempt to restrain her and stood up to glare down at Gale, clenching her fists at her sides as she spoke. "If you're so concerned about the danger, go ahead and run home. But I'm staying. I'm staying here with my new brothers, who risk their lives for me just like I risk my life for them. I'm staying for the dead, for the soldiers who gave their lives for this army; I'll see this through to the end on behalf of the men who aren't here to do it for themselves anymore. I'm staying to fight for my country, because a bunch of rebel hotheads can't just tear it in two whenever they feel like it. I'm staying for the slaves, cause one visit to one plantation was enough to cure me of any notion that it wasn't my problem. You want to desert, Gale, you go right ahead. I'm staying. I'm fighting. I'm not leaving until we claim our victory. I won't go home a quitter, I'm going to go home a victor."

The applause startled them all. They looked up to find that Katniss's tirade had been attracting the attention of passing soldiers; by the time she had finished, there was quite a sizable group gathered. They could hear the occasional comment from the crowd.

"What happened?"

"What sparked all of that?"

"Is that Sergeant Hawthorne from the 47th?"

"I guess that guy was talking about quitting and going home, and Lieutenant Everdeen set him straight."

"Everdeen really put Hawthorne in his place."

"That Lieutenant Everdeen is a hell of an officer."

"Man, I'd follow that guy anywhere."

"Everdeen is on fire!"

"Guess now we know how he can be a Lieutenant that young."

"All right, boys, show's over," General Abernathy said. "I'm sure you all have camps to return to." The crowd began to drift away, leaving them with their privacy once again.

"They're right, Kat," Finnick said. "That was amazing."

Katniss sat down and began fidgeting again, uncomfortable with praise as always. Without thinking of what the gesture meant, Peeta reached out and placed a hand on her knee to steady her. "Just accept it. That was pretty incredible."

Katniss looked up at him, nodded a bit, and finally offered a small smile.

"I wonder what they'd think if they knew that big speech had come from a woman pretending to be a soldier," Gale sneered.

"I'm sure that if someone were to tell them, that person would find themselves facing lashes for insubordination towards a superior officer," Haymitch said easily, handing Gale a slip of paper. "Here's my reply to Colonel Boggs. Go deliver it like a good boy, and if you have any sense in that head of yours, you'll table this discussion until after the war." Haymitch waved him off. "Now, on your way, Sergeant Hawthorne."

Gale gave everyone one more glare before standing and stomping off.

"Well," Finnick said, "That was interesting."

"I'm sorry about that, guys," Katniss said. "Normally Gale's a great guy. But he's always had a temper, and he's always been a bit overprotective of me."

"Sounds like he doesn't really like women, either," Caesar said.

"I don't know where that came from," Katniss said, truly mystified. "Gale and I have been hunting together since I was twelve and he was fourteen."

"That reminds me," Caesar said, "I have no idea how old you actually are, Katnip is it?"

Katniss flushed. She decided she may as well be honest with this group. These were the people she truly trusted, truly considered friends. "I'm 20 now, Peeta and I are the same age. And my name is Katniss. Catnip is just a stupid nickname Gale came up with when we were kids."

"Well, pleased to finally meet you, Katniss," Caesar said with a grin as he stuck out his hand. Katniss grinned back as she dramatically took his hand and shook.

In the end, even though Gale was an ass, Katniss was forever thankful for his visit that night, because it prompted her true introduction to her friend and comrade Captain Caesar.

He was killed in action two days later.

…..

_January 15, 1865_

Katniss was growing more and more frustrated. She and Peeta were supposed to be on forage duty, collecting firewood for the next few days. And if Katniss took some time to bag some game to supplement their rations, so much the better. But instead of doing any of that, she was looking for Peeta, who was lost in the woods.

Again.

He was doing this on purpose. He had to be. Not even he could get this lost this quickly, not with the snow cover the way it was. If she was being honest, he was actually doing a pretty good job of covering his tracks. He had looped back on his own trail so many times that she had no idea which of his tracks she should be following. It was pretty effective, she grudgingly had to admit to herself.

She would not give him the satisfaction of admitting it to him.

To be fair, Peeta was not the major source of her frustration. She'd been in a foul mood of one sort or another for months now. Ever since the double-whammy of her contentious encounter with Gale and the loss of Caesar back in November, really. When Caesar had died, he had been the last member of the company other than Peeta who had been there when she had arrived less than three years ago. Everyone else had either died like Caesar and Marvel, or been promoted out of the company like Abernathy and Odair. The whole company now was just her, Peeta, and a bunch of kids.

Two 20-year-olds referring to the rest of their company as kids.

It wasn't like she was previously unaware of the extreme mortality of her situation. In the last two and a half years she had lost too many friends and comrades to count. As she had told Gale the night before Caesar died, she had been in the middle of some of the most horrific fighting this war had to offer. And for every soldier that died in battle, two or three were lost to disease. She had been able to bear up under all of it. She had already borne so much in her life, it seemed she was well trained for even this aspect of warfare. She only broke at night, in her sleep, and when she did Peeta always put her back together by morning. But somehow, being the last two left cast their jeopardy in such stark terms that it began to wear on even her steely resolve. It was harder and harder to ignore the possibility of her death, or the possibility of Peeta's death.

Sometimes she wasn't sure which one of those scared her more.

Having to break in the new kids was a task she took no joy in. Somehow, even after all this time, the army still had soldiers who had never been in combat. Never looked across the field at a Confederate skirmishing line and feared for their lives. A bunch of glory-seeking jackasses who couldn't wait until it was their turn to see the elephant.

And Colonel Odair's choice of who to promote to replace Caesar as company commander in charge of all these jackasses was probably her greatest annoyance of all.

Ironically, it was her company's recent rotation away from the front lines at Petersburg that had really started fraying Katniss's nerves. Both armies had settled in for the winter –though nobody who grew up with Pennsylvania blizzards could ever call this Virginia weather 'winter' – and General Abernathy wanted to make sure his troops were rested and ready, just in case something major happened unexpectedly. Thus this new rotation, giving each company time away from the front.

Everyone seemed to like the idea. Everyone but Katniss, that is. At least at the front there was the enemy to concentrate on. For the next few weeks, baring a breakthrough, she didn't even have that. She understood what Haymitch was trying to achieve. In theory more rest was always a good thing. But in practice what it gave Katniss was too much time to think and not enough to do.

It really should have been two of the kids out here chopping wood, but Katniss had jumped at the chance to spend some time in the woods, and to finally _do_ something. And naturally, Peeta had jumped at the chance to accompany her.

She remembered a time when that would have bothered her. Now it kind of bothered her that it didn't. She felt like she should find Peeta's constant presence in her life bothersome, intrusive, suffocating. But instead she found it oddly…

…comforting?

She finally heard Peeta's heavy gait - it was a wonder his tread had never given their position away to the enemy, really - and made her way over to him. He broke into a wide grin at the sight of her, and she groaned. She knew what was coming when she saw that grin.

"Captain Everdeen, sir! So glad to see you, sir! I've been trying to find you, sir!"

Katniss rolled her eyes. Coming from anyone else, the constant emphasis on her new rank would be blatant jealousy, but she knew Peeta only did it to get a rise out of her. "Peeta, if you call me 'sir' one more time, I'm going to start giving you orders," she warned.

"Sir! Yes, sir! Sorry, sir! My apologies, sir! The lieutenant will try to remember not to call you sir, sir!"

Katniss rolled her eyes again, but she let out a soft laugh, which only made Peeta's grin grow wider. "Come on," she said, "if we don't get going on this we'll never finish."

"Isn't that the point?" Peeta asked. "I thought we were here because you wanted to get away from the kids for a while and spend some time in the woods. Now you're in a hurry to get back?"

She was about to snap off a retort, when she decided not to bother. "You're right," she said. "But let's get the wood chopped and ready first."

This time Peeta actually snapped off a mocking salute. "Aye, aye, Captain."

She gave him a playful shove, prompting him to laugh again. One thing she did not anticipate was how much of a goofball Peeta could be. He didn't get a lot of opportunity to display that side of himself in the middle of the war, but with the sudden abundance of downtime he had taken it upon herself to improve her foul mood. He had been acting irrepressibly silly for more than a week now. The most shocking thing was how much she enjoyed it.

None of her reactions to Peeta made any sense to her anymore.

Once they actually got down to work, they made quick work of the firewood gathering. Peeta had picked up a few techniques from his time working forage duty with Joe Mason that helped make the job go faster. They left their cart loaded and ready to go while they spent the afternoon wasting time and putting off their return to camp. Katniss brought in a decent haul hunting, and they made a lunch for themselves from one of the rabbits. They shared happy memories of home, as they often did when they had time to fill; Katniss talking about hunting or telling stories about Prim and Peeta reminiscing about baking with his father. They allowed the peace and solitude of the woods lull them into a short nap. They spent quite a while slinging handfuls of snow at each other, an altercation started by Peeta, of course. Katniss surprised herself again with how much she enjoyed such a juvenile pursuit; she thought Peeta was acting like an undisciplined child, and she didn't even want to think about being caught by any of the other soldiers who might have been out in the woods that day, but she found herself forgetting her worries and screaming laughing right along with Peeta as they chased each other with their snowy ammunition.

They were making their way back to their cart, tired and sore and wet and cold but grinning like idiots, when they found a tall man in Union blue eyeing their load of firewood.

"Something catch your interest, soldier?" Peeta called out as they approached. In the state they were in, neither of them wanted to have to replace their load of wood because it had been poached by another soldier.

But as they got closer and the soldier turned to face them, they both knew that the man eyeing their load was no stranger to poaching.

"Hello, Gale," Peeta greeted him warily.

Gale answered with a gruff nod. "Mellark."

"What's your interest in our firewood?" Katniss asked.

"Just wondering who abandoned it," he said carefully. "I thought I heard someone screaming before."

Katniss blushed deep red and looked down at the ground. The last thing she wanted was to have to tell Gale that she spent her day in the woods having a snow fight. With Katniss silenced in embarrassment, Peeta was left to stammer, "That's, um, that was nothing. There's no- er, everything's fine."

Gale gave them both a long look. "Okay," he finally said.

They stood in awkward silence for a while. Katniss had both wanted and dreaded to see Gale again after their last meeting. She wanted to find out what had happened to her friend, and why he had lashed out at her like he did that day. But whenever she thought about it, the hurt and the anger about what happened quickly overwhelmed any other feelings she had, and they did so again now. Peeta was obviously staying quiet to see how she wanted to handle the situation, and Gale looked like he was unsure what to say, so it was left to her to finally speak up, with her hurt and anger smothering any feelings of friendship or affection she held for the man who was once as close as a brother. "So you found us. Do you need anything else, Sergeant?"

Gale grimaced at her gruff tone. "'Sergeant'? Really? Is that where we are now?"

"You tell me, Gale. The first time I see my friend in more than two years, and all he does is insult me. He says I'm incompetent and useless and he accuses me of bedding every man in sight. I could really do without that today, so I think Peeta and I are just going to take our cart and go."

Gale sighed. "Look, can we talk, Katniss?"

Katniss was nowhere near being ready to let her anger go. "You don't think you did enough talking the last time we saw each other?" she spat at him.

Gale struggled for a moment trying to come up with a response, and it was Peeta who spoke up first. "Katniss…"

She turned her ire on her comrade. She was shocked that Peeta wasn't backing her up, and more than a bit surprised at just how deep her feelings of betrayal were. "Don't you take his side in this. Don't try to excuse the things he said."

"You know I would never do that. You know I'm always here for you, no matter what," he said, his voice thick with sincerity in the way she had never heard in anyone's voice but Peeta's. It was enough to mollify her hurt feelings long enough for him to explain himself.

They were both too focused on each other for either of them to notice Gale's reaction to their exchange.

"How much time have you spent in the last two years wishing you could talk to Gale?" Peeta asked, and Katniss's angry façade faltered for a moment. She was unable to counter his point; she had indeed spent much of her time in the army, especially the year and a half since Gettysburg, wishing there was a way she could communicate with Gale. Now here he was, and he already knew her secret about being in the army. Regardless of the hurtful things he had said at their last meeting, they had been friends for eight years. They had struggled and suffered together. They had survived together. She wasn't ready to throw all of that away.

Katniss didn't say anything, but Peeta could see the change in her demeanor and knew he had won her over. It was a bittersweet victory, to be sure. He knew exactly what Gale wanted to talk to her about. He knew exactly why the idea of Katniss spending two years with him had sent Gale into such a maelstrom of anger. He, better than almost anyone, knew what it looked like when a man was in love with Katniss Everdeen. And yet here he was helping Gale, arguing with Katniss on Gale's behalf. Because he knew Gale was her closest friend. Because he knew that if she lost that friendship, she would always regret it. She would always miss Gale, regardless of how angry she was with him at the moment.

He really was too nice for his own good sometimes.

"Why don't I go get lost in the woods again?" he suggested with a weak smile. "You can come rescue me when you're ready to go back to camp."

Katniss hesitated a moment before nodding at him. "Okay. I'll see you later." When he was several yards away she called after him, "Don't get too lost." He just waved back at her, so she added, "That's an order, Lieutenant!"

"Aye aye, Captain," he threw over his shoulder before he was lost in a copse of trees.

She couldn't help but smile a bit at Peeta's joke, as always, but she quickly lost her grin when she turned and saw the frown on Gale's face. "What, Gale? What's pissing you off now?"

"I'm just trying to understand what I just saw," Gale said. "Did you just take someone's advice? Did you just let someone tell you what to do?"

Katniss scowled at him. He was right, she wasn't always the best at accepting advice, but she didn't understand why he was being so hostile towards Peeta. Gale had always harbored some resentment toward the merchant families in Panem, but Peeta was a fellow soldier. "As loathe as I am to admit it, he's usually right. He's not a hotheaded idiot like some other people I know."

Gale had the decency to look chagrinned at the accusation in her tone. "Does a hotheaded idiot get a chance to apologize?"

"I'm not sure I can forgive the things you said," she answered honestly.

"Come on, Catnip. I was just so angry that you had hidden this from me, and that you had put yourself in such danger."

Katniss wasn't buying his excuse. "And that's why you said I couldn't do anything because I'm a woman? When you know that I'm a better shot and a better tracker than most of this army, including you? That's why you said I was fucking a half-dozen different men, when you know I've never so much as courted anyone?" She paused for a moment, but Gale had no ready response. "If you want to be pissed at me, fine. If you wish I was home safe, then fine. But what you said has nothing to do with any of that. I know we have our blow-ups sometimes, but what you said last fall was so far over the line, Gale. I don't think I can just forgive and forget."

Gale did look genuinely remorseful, at least. "Look, I'm sorry I said that stuff. I really am. I didn't mean it the way you're saying, I just wanted you to go home so you'd be safe. You know how I get when I'm angry. But god, Katniss, don't you think I have a right to be angry about this? You disappeared for years, and nobody would tell me anything. I was worried sick! And it's no exaggeration that I had half of Panem looking for you, I had everyone in the 47th write home and ask their parents and their wives if they had heard anything about you. I didn't know if you had been in some accident and you were keeping it secret, if you had died and my family didn't want to tell me by mail, if you had simply vanished one day and nobody knew what happened to you… I had so many crazy ideas. And then I finally find you, and it turns out you've been intentionally hiding from me. Intentionally lying to me, and getting your family to lie to me too. Not only that, but you've been in the war. Risking your life every day. Heck, I'm lucky I got to see you alive at all! Plus, you had this whole group of men you felt close enough to that they got the truth while I was fed lies. I thought we were as close as family, but you lied to me while you were honest with them, so what does that say?"

Katniss actually felt guilty for just a moment, because he was right, they were as close as family and she had lied to him. But as quickly as she started feeling some sympathy for Gale's position, he made sure to wipe it away. "Not to mention you were all cozy with Mellark-"

Katniss cut him off. Gale may have had a point about how she hid from him, though she still thought she was justified there, but his antagonism towards Peeta was really getting on her nerves. "Why do you keep bringing up Peeta? What's your problem with him?"

Gale opened his mouth to speak, but then stopped and shook his head a bit. "You know, you can be really dense sometimes."

Katniss bristled at the casual insult. "Well, you'll just have to speak slowly. Use small words. I am just a woman, after all."

"I already apologized for that," Gale said weakly.

"And I haven't accepted yet," Katniss countered. "So, explain yourself. I serve in a company with a hundred men, in a regiment with a thousand, in a division with ten thousand. Why is the presence of Peeta Mellark such an offense to you?"

"Because he's more than just another soldier to you," Gale said.

"So now you're calling me a whore again?" Katniss said, her anger growing. "That kind of undercuts your apology from earlier."

"That's not what I meant," Gale said. He huffed out a breath of frustration. Whether he was more frustrated with his inability to make himself clear or Katniss's complete lack of understanding, he didn't know. "I'm just saying, you trust him. You let him touch you. You're so comfortable with him holding on to you that you didn't even notice it until I pointed it out. You let him talk you into this, and he didn't even have to try all that hard. You never trust anybody, it took you years to trust me, but you trust him."

Gale was getting uncomfortably close to topics Katniss didn't want to discuss and truths she didn't want to admit, not even to herself. "I've been serving with him for more than two years," she said. "He's my second-in-command of this company. If I didn't trust him, we'd have some serious problems."

"You trust him as more than just a fellow soldier," Gale accused.

"He _is_ my fellow soldier," Katniss countered. "He's the only other soldier in the company that has been here as long as I have. He's saved my life more times than I can count."

"He's not the only one who's saved your life," Gale said, an accusatory tone sneaking into his voice.

Katniss scowled at him. "We saved each other, Gale. Don't make it more than it was."

"More than it was?" Gale echoed indignantly. "What was it exactly?"

"We worked together. We helped each other. It's not like I owe you anything."

Gale scoffed angrily. "Christ, Katniss, I didn't think you spent time with me because you _owed_ it to me."

"Then what were you saying?" Katniss asked, struggling to control her own growing anger. "Look, I get why you were angry, but you know why I had to hide from you. You would have done everything you could to get me kicked out of the army, in fact that's what you _did_ do as soon as you found out. If you can forgive me for hiding from you, then I'll forgive you for not trusting me enough to make my own decision. But none of that explains why you're madder about Peeta than you are about me. He hasn't done anything to hurt me. He's my friend, just like you're my friend."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Gale said darkly.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" she asked, growing more and more frustrated by the discussion. She didn't seem to be getting any closer to figuring out what exactly was upsetting Gale so much. "I'm not allowed to have more than one friend now?"

Gale shook his head. "Sometimes I just don't get you, Catnip. You can spot a snow hare a quarter-mile away but you can't see what's right in front of your face. You can't see when another man is trying to take you away from me."

Finally, it dawned on Katniss what he was trying to say. There had always been rumors about the two of them, but there was no truth to them. They didn't feel like that about each other. At least she didn't. And neither did he, she tried to reassure herself.

She tried to talk, but her throat was closed. "Take-?"

"I don't remember exactly when I fell in love with you," Gale continued as if she hadn't spoken. "It wasn't when we first met, not for a few years after that. I remember one time we took down this huge buck, and you had the widest smile on your face. You never smile, but this was a special day and your whole face lit up, and for the first time I thought, god I want to kiss her." Katniss tried to respond, but even if she could force air through her constricted throat she had no idea what she would try to say.

"I love everything about you," Gale continued. "I love how you take in a little gasp of air after every shot you take. I love the way your nose crinkles when an animal jerks left instead of right and your shot doesn't go where you wanted it. I love how you don't take shit from even the haughtiest merchants. I love the little blush that rises on your cheeks when we fight. I love that you can give as good as you get." He paused for a moment, and sighed heavily. "And I know you don't feel the same way about me. I know you've never seen me as anything more than a friend. But I thought…" He trailed off, and kicked at the ground in frustration. "I really thought one day you might. You never showed any interest in anyone else, and I thought that eventually you'd want to settle down with someone, and it'd be me. Maybe not for a while, maybe not till after Prim was married and living on her own, but one day. One day we'd finally be together, the way everyone but you always thought we should be."

Katniss was struggling to understand everything he had just said. It was like her whole life had been turned on its side. She and Gale had hunted together for years, and in all that time he had never given any indication that he thought of her as anything other than a friend. All of a sudden she had to reevaluate the last several years she and Gale had spent together, now that she had this new information.

Her only experience with a man being interested in her that way was Peeta, and the two experiences couldn't be more different. She had at first doubted Peeta's sincerity, but over the years she had warmed to him, and he was now one of the most important people in her life, right up there with Prim and Gale. Gale's confession had the exact opposite effect on her; she didn't for a moment doubt that he was being truthful, but the revelation made her want to draw back, to put distance between her and Gale's feelings, both figuratively and literally. She didn't want to take any chances of accidentally giving him any reason to believe that she returned his feelings.

That thought left her confused, but not for any reason having to do with Gale. Her immediate reaction to Gale's confession of love was to draw away from him to make sure he didn't think she felt similarly, but she felt no such compunction with Peeta. She and Peeta had only grown closer after he confessed his feelings; she still routinely shared things with him that she could never imagine sharing with anyone else. Her secrets, her feelings, her deepest fears. Not to mention her bed. If she was being honest with herself, she knew that they were more than just friends, but what were they exactly? And why had she had such opposite reactions to Peeta's and Gale's quite similar declarations? Could it mean that she actually returned Peeta's feelings of love?

That question, more than anything else about Gale's confession, left her mentally reeling. She had never made time or space for love in her life, dismissing it as an unnecessary distraction and secretly being afraid that if she ever let herself fall in love, it would have the same disastrous effect on her that it had had on her mother. She had spent the past few years telling herself that what she shared with Peeta was just a necessity of the war, that when they went home they could be normal friends, like she and Gale were. But now the revelation of Gale's true feelings was forcing her to realize that she wasn't friends with Peeta the way she was friends with Gale, that she shared something much deeper and more powerful with Peeta, and that thought frightened her, because she didn't know how to deal with it.

Gale could see the turmoil on her face, and he knew her well enough to know why it was there. He kind of hated to do this to her, but sometimes his Catnip could be one of the most willfully oblivious people he knew. Even if he had to force it on her, she deserved to know the truth, about him and about Peeta. And about herself.

He had a weak, sad smile on his face when he resumed speaking. "But now I'm too late, aren't I?"

"Gale-" Katniss tried, but she still didn't know what to say, and so fell silent again.

"I can see it in you now, you're falling for him," Gale said. "You're falling for Mellark."

Katniss tried to deny it, she wanted desperately to deny it, even two minutes earlier she would have vehemently denied it, but now the best she could do was stand silent and not admit to it. Gale ran a hand over his face and let out a heavy breath into his palm. "God, I must have been blind not to see it before. There was too much happening that night, I was shocked and relieved and angry and hurt, and jealous, so so jealous, and I couldn't see what was right in front of my face. Couldn't or wouldn't, I guess." He shook his head and chuckled a bit. "It's a wonder your whole company hasn't figured out who you are just based on how you two act around each other."

As time had passed and Gale had continued to speak, Katniss had slowly begun trying to reign in her frazzled mind, trying to recover from the afternoon's revelations and put her thoughts back in order. She had been working up the necessary stability and control to deny everything Gale was saying. But when she opened her mouth to speak, something very different came out. "How do we act around each other?"

Gale gave her a small, knowing smile; there was an admission in her question. As much as she hated that he knew her so well, as much as she hated the blush she could feel heating her cheeks, Katniss couldn't help but relax a bit. The conversation was beginning to feel more like the comfortable coexistence she and Gale had shared before the war. She greedily welcomed the return of her longtime friend, and as much as she wanted to deny what he was saying about her feelings toward Peeta, she knew she couldn't lie to him. He knew her almost as well as she knew herself. Better, sometimes.

"You're way too comfortable touching each other," Gale said in answer to her question. "I can't imagine what it looks like to someone who thinks you're a man."

"It doesn't look good," slipped out of Katniss's mouth before she could stop it. Now that Gale was acting more like the friend she knew and not a jilted lover, now that she was relaxing into their discussion, she wasn't thinking as carefully about what she was saying, and her thoughts were coming out of her mouth more freely than she would have preferred. She knew Gale wouldn't let her remark go, so she sighed and explained. "There have been rumors about us in camp, from time to time. Nobody makes anything of it, it's very live-and-let-live when there are bullets flying, but we know they talk about us."

"They suspect you're a woman?" Gale asked.

"No, they suspect we're sodomites."

For just a moment Gale's whole face went slack with surprise, then he began laughing as if it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He tried to reply coherently, but all that came out of his mouth was "You… They… He… Hahahahahaha!" before his laughter overcame him again.

Katniss quickly grew frustrated with his reaction. "It's not that funny," she said, shoving him in the shoulder.

Gale tried to reign in his laughter, but was only partly successful. "Come on! Your regiment will believe that, but it doesn't occur to them that you're a girl? That's pretty funny."

It _was_ kind of funny, but she wasn't about to admit that to him. "Shut up," she said with another, softer shove, dipping her head to hide her own amusement.

Gale decided to let it go. "Listen, Katniss, I'm pretty sure Mellark knows how he feels about you. He's too damn genuine, the look on his face gives him away like a shop sign. Has he told you he has feelings for you?"

"Yes," she admitted quietly, her eyes remaining fixed on the ground at his feet.

"Hmm," Gale huffed. "Braver man than me." The admission surprised Katniss, so much that she looked up and met his gaze. "Do me a favor. Don't mess this up. Don't risk losing this because you're afraid to admit you want it. Mellark's a good guy; I can't say I'm happy to see you with someone other than me, but you could do a lot worse."

_I don't think I could do any better_, she just managed not to say. Once she was sure that that wouldn't come out of her mouth when she opened it, she asked, "Why do you say he's a good guy? You don't know him. You don't even call him by his name."

"He just tried to push the girl he loves into the arms of another man, because he thought that's what she wanted," he said, sadness thick in his voice. "I know how hard that is, cause I'm trying to return the favor, and it's killing me."

"Gale…" she began, but found it difficult to complete a sentence. Emotion was thick in the atmosphere surrounding their conversation, emotion she had no experience and little interest in dealing with. But her mind was finally settling itself, and with clearer thinking her instinct for denial reasserted itself. "Gale, you've got all of this wrong," she said, finally able to form the words even if her voice still lacked conviction. "I'm not interested in Peeta that way. I'm not interested in anyone that way."

Gale just shook his head at her. "You can tell yourself that, but I know you better. I can see how you act around him. I can see how you trust him. If you're not in love yet, you're on your way there. If you'll allow it."

His phrasing grabbed her attention. She had said that to Peeta once. A million years ago, it felt like. Before this interminable siege. Before Cold Harbor. Before the Wilderness. Before Gettysburg. Back when so many of their comrades were still alive. Back when she was so young and naïve that she thought it couldn't get any worse than Antietam. Way back then, Peeta had asked her to let him be her friend, and she had allowed it. She had allowed a lot more than that in the time since then, truth be told, allowed it without really thinking about it.

But she would not allow _this_. She would not allow herself to fall in love. Not with Peeta, not with Gale, not with anyone. Not when any of them could be killed tomorrow. Not when there was a war to win. Not when she had Prim to take care of. She couldn't afford to let herself be distracted by something as dangerous as _love_.

"You're wrong, Gale," she repeated, her voice hardening.

"All right," Gale said, not at all believing her. "After all of this is over, when we're all back in Panem, I'll come see you, and we'll see who's wrong." His mouth ticked up with the hint of a smirk. "If you're still in denial then, maybe I won't give up so easily. Maybe you'll marry me after all."

Katniss just huffed out a breath. She wanted to say something smart back to him, to dismiss his ridiculous idea out of hand. But she didn't want to completely trample his feelings after he had trusted her with them. She didn't want to break her best friend's heart. So instead she just said, "I should go find Peeta. I shouldn't let him get too lost."

Gale smiled indulgently at her. "Of course. Obviously you don't want you to lose Peeta." Katniss scowled at him; he just laughed at her response. "How lost do you think he is? Do you want my help tracking him down?"

"Oh, he's not lost, not really," she said. "But a little help wouldn't hurt. He's surprisingly inventive at hiding himself."

Thirty minutes later, he saw what she meant. Katniss let Gale take the lead in following Peeta's tracks, and amused herself watching him become more and more frustrated with the hunt. Peeta hadn't doubled-back on himself to the same degree as he had when he was evading Katniss earlier in the day, but he still managed to trip them up a time or two. When they came to the same clearing for the third time, Gale threw up his hands in frustration. "I swear there are more tracks here now than there were the last time we were here!"

Katniss chuckled to herself. "I think I have an idea how to find him."

"Then by all means, lead the way!"

But she didn't go anywhere. Instead she raised her voice, and called out, "Lieutenant Mellark! Present yourself for inspection!"

"Aye aye, Captain Katniss!" a voice called out from behind and to the left of her, confirming her suspicion that Peeta was hiding within earshot. She turned to see Peeta stepping out from behind a large tree, followed by another Union soldier, a thickly-muscled black man even taller than Gale. "You may have found me," Peeta said, gesturing to his companion, "but look who I found."

Even with the heavy tension of the afternoon, Katniss couldn't help the wide smile that took over her face. "Thresh!" She jogged over and surprised herself a bit when she gave the man a quick hug. "It's so good to see you, Thresh." She pulled back and took a good look at him. "_Sergeant_ Thresh," she amended.

"Sergeant Seeder, actually," he corrected her. "Army recruiter said I had to have a surname for my enlistment forms, so I used my mama's name."

"That's great." Katniss had a million questions she wanted to ask, but before she could ask any of them she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up to find Gale just behind her, his face writ with confusion.

"Uhhh, Katniss?" he asked, but then immediately realized his mistake. "Er, um, I mean, Kat!" Even as he was rushing to cover for his error, he belatedly realized that Peeta had just used Katniss's real name in front of this man. Meaning he had just made himself sound like an idiot for nothing. He spied Peeta over Katniss's shoulder, trying to contain a laugh, and scowled at him.

"It's all right, Gale," Katniss said. She smiled at his discomfort, which only made his scowl deeper. "This is Thresh, he's a friend of ours." Something about the casual way she said that made his gut churn; _ours_, meaning hers and Mellark's. They were already a unit. Even if he had acknowledged that fact earlier, it didn't make it hurt any less to see it in front of his face.

Katniss turned back to the larger man. "Thresh, this is my friend Gale. He's a friend from back home," she said, hoping he would understand her implication.

"So he knows?" he asked her, wanting to be sure. At her nod, Thresh extended his hand. Gale, not knowing what else to do, shook it. "Gale…" he said as if trying to place a memory. "Are you Rory's brother?"

Gale froze, and narrowed his eyes at the newcomer. "How do you know Rory?"

"Thresh and his friend Rue have been staying in Panem for a while," Peeta supplied.

"Rue and Prim are practically best friends now," Thresh explained. "And Rory follows that girl around like a puppy on a leash."

Despite his discomfort with this colored man who seemed to be Katniss's new best friend - seriously, since when did Catnip hug people? - Gale found himself smiling. Thresh had certainly described Rory accurately enough; he and Prim had been sweet on each other for years now.

"How is Prim?" Katniss asked eagerly.

Thresh smiled at that. "She's doing well. Misses you something awful. She and Rue spend hours talking about you; Prim wants to know all about what you're like as a soldier, and Rue wants to know all about what you're like at home. It's cute."

"That's where he got to know Rory so well," Peeta explained. "The two of them are left on their own while the girls tell stories about you."

"Wait, Rory knows about me being here?" Katniss asked.

"Prim told him," Thresh answered. "Don't get too mad at her, he hasn't told a soul, not even his mama. I don't think Prim could keep a secret from Rory if she tried."

"You know that's true, Catnip," Gale said. "So, how did you all meet?"

The three of them haltingly told the story of how they had met, frequently checking with each other to make sure they were sticking to safe topics, skipping over personal details like the abuse Rue had suffered, Katniss's bread story, and any mention of Peeta's mother. Gale could tell he was only getting half the story, it was obvious from the way they would all glace at each other before one of them would finally say something, or the way one would begin a sentence only to abandon it at a sharp glare from another. It irked him, and it hurt him, that these two men – two men now! – were privy to secrets that Catnip wouldn't trust him with. He tried to reassure himself that once this was all over, once they were back together in Panem, then they could work everything out. Then they would be as close as siblings again. And in the back of his mind, he hadn't completely abandoned his hope for more.

Thresh filled an eager Katniss in on his and Rue's experiences since they had last seen each other almost two years earlier. He and Rue had indeed found shelter with the Undersees as Katniss had suggested, Rue working for the family as a housekeeper and Thresh as a field hand to help earn their keep. Rue and Prim had become fast friends, which lead to a parallel friendship between Thresh and Rory. Rory, though he was only 16, was eager to join the fight, a fact that concerned Gale greatly. The last thing he wanted was his little brother in the army facing enemy fire.

With Dr. Marcus having been drafted into the army in the summer of '63, Prim and her mother were the only ones left in Panem for anyone seeking medical care. Prim thrived with the new responsibilities, using her own caring instincts and the skills her mother had taught her to skillfully treat all manner of illnesses and injuries. Katniss beamed at the description of her little sister taking care of the remaining Panem residents; she knew Prim was in her natural element when she was taking care of someone.

The Hawthornes were doing well. Rory was still too young to work in the deep mines, but the mining company hired younger boys to do odd jobs outside the mine, and Rory was finding as many of them as he could, his pay combining with the money Gale sent home each week and the proceeds from the in-home laundry business Hazelle had started after her husband died to support the family quite nicely. Hazelle had roped Vick into helping her with the washing to keep him form following his brother to the mines, though it was only a temporary fix. Unless you owned one of the shops in town, there was really only one employer in Panem for men over 18.

Thresh had little news to share with Peeta; since Peeta didn't want his mother to know where he was, Thresh couldn't just go to the bakery and introduce himself as Peeta's friend. The one time he had tried going there on the pretense of buying some bread, Mrs. Mellark had chased him away, loudly informing him that they didn't serve "his kind" there. Peeta hadn't really expected anything different.

When Thresh had learned that the army was enlisting colored troops in Philadelphia, some of Rory's fervor began to rub off on him. It didn't sit right with him that a million white men were on the front lines fighting for black freedom while he was tending crops in Pennsylvania. He waited until after the fall harvest to truly consider the idea, as he felt he owed Mr. Undersee at least the full season of work, but once the harvest was in he could think of no reason to stay other than cowardice. Rue feared for his safety and begged him not to enlist, but in the end his conscience would not let him stay. There were millions of slaves still waiting for the day when a troop of Union soldiers would march through and deliver their new freedom. He wanted that day to be as soon as possible. He wanted to help free those men and women still enslaved, like Peeta and Katniss had helped free him. It was shortly after the winter holidays when he had made the trip to Philadelphia and signed up.

"And now we're almost there," he concluded. "Every day we're getting closer to the day when Lee has to give up Richmond. Sherman already tore up Georgia, rumor is he's going to lay into South Carolina any day now. It's only a matter of time now, soon the rebellion will be crushed and all men will be free."

"And the women too, right?" Katniss asked, giving Thresh a gentle nudge in the ribs.

Soon enough, the sun began to dip down towards the horizon, signaling the end to the impromptu reunions of the day. Gale, needing some time to himself to think about everything, claimed to be late for a curfew and left on his own. Thresh stayed with Katniss and Peeta for part of their trip back to camp before returning to his own regiment, the three of them able to talk more freely about more private topics without Gale there. It began to gnaw at Katniss that she could share things with these men that she couldn't share with her best friend, but they weren't all her secrets to share. For six years she had had no secrets from Gale, their lives had been too intertwined for there to be secrets between them. _Except apparently for Gale's deepest feelings_, she thought wryly. But for the past two and a half years, they had lived separate lives. She had shared history with Peeta and Thresh that Gale knew nothing about. He undoubtedly had similar bonds with men from his regiment. Who would they be by the time they returned home? Surely not the same people they were before. Would the two people who returned home after this war ever be as close as the two people who left home in '62? She could only hope so.

Once Thresh left to return to his camp, the silence weighed heavily between Katniss and Peeta. Katniss hesitated to say anything, knowing that Peeta would want to know how things went between her and Gale. She knew he would never ask her to tell him, but somehow that only made her feel more obligated to speak. "So. Gale loves me."

Peeta's eyes widened slightly, but after a moment he just nodded. "Yeah."

Katniss let out a frustrated groan. "What, did everybody know that but me?"

"Possibly," Peeta said with a light laugh. He became serious when he saw how genuinely angry Katniss was feeling. "To tell you the truth, before I got to know you, I thought the two of you were already together. I think most people in Panem did. Surely you knew that?"

"Of course. I knew what people said about us. But I never gave it any thought, I didn't care what people thought. We were just friends."

"Apparently not," Peeta said gently.

That brought Katniss up short. "Huh. Apparently not."

"So when's the wedding?" Peeta asked.

Katniss's eyes widened and her jaw fell open. Did he really think-? She panicked for just a moment. She had barely made it through the discussion she had had with Gale that afternoon; she couldn't rehash the entire thing trying to explain herself to Peeta. But when she looked over at him, she saw him fighting a smile and the teasing glint in his eyes. She tried to sigh with relief and burst out laughing at the same time, and wound up choking so hard her eyes watered. She tried to hit him in the shoulder but he spun away with a laugh.

She should have known that Peeta wouldn't do that to her. He never made any demands of her. He had barely asked for her friendship. In the back of her mind, she knew what he wanted, what he must want. Both he and Gale wanted the same thing from her, but only Gale was forward enough to actually say so. Peeta gave and gave of himself without ever asking anything in return. He would probably have to be heavily drugged before he would be so forward as to ask anything of her.

For the first time she began to feel selfish for letting this go on as long as she had. She was not going to allow herself to fall in love, not the way Peeta surely hoped she would.

She didn't consciously distance herself from Peeta in the weeks that followed. It's not like they always slept next to each other, she told herself as she bedded down on her own side of the tent each night. Peeta will eventually calm on his own, she told herself as she lied awake at night listening to him thrash about. I can take care of myself, she told herself as she pushed Peeta away and urged him to return to sleep after he woke her from her nightmares. I can survive without anyone, she told herself as she waited for her heart to stop racing, as she wiped the cold sweat from her brow, as she spent her nights cold and afraid and alone.

…..

_Hello all. Long time no see. 132 days since my last update. Sorry about that. This chapter was completely rewritten several times before I was finally satisfied with it. I took Gale's characterization all the way from raging possessive asshole to selfless supportive brother and back again, and eventually settled at this spot on the spectrum. I hope it works._

_So, amongst all the replotting and rewriting, this chapter grew into kind of a beast. I usually target 3k-4k words per chapter, and this one is over 10k. I considered splitting it into two parts, or even three, but I figured I had already made you wait so long for an update, I'd make it a good long one. _

_The good news is that we're in the home stretch of this story. The next chapter will cover the aftermath of the surrender at Appomattox. Who will survive the fighting to come? Who will be maimed for life? Who will be killed? What will happen to the wartime bond forged by Katniss and Peeta now that the war is over? You'll find out when I post the next chapter __**exactly one week from today!**_


	6. Chapter 6

_April 11, 1865_

Katniss sat in the chair by the bed, holding Peeta's hand. If anyone gave them funny looks, she ignored them. They had seen so much carnage, so much death, lost so much, she wasn't going to let a bunch of gossipy nurses affect her.

Her other arm, the one in the sling, ached horribly, but she ignored the pain. She didn't want them to give her any more morphine, she wanted to be awake and alert when Peeta woke up. She had big news to share with him, after all.

They had both been injured in the same battle, almost a week ago now. She had taken a severe blow to the head and several bayonet wounds on her forearm. The cuts were deep, and had bled heavily. The combination of the blow to the head, the blood loss, and the morphine they dosed her with had left her unconscious for days. But Peeta was so much worse.

He had been shot in the leg. Just one shot, the first he ever took after four years of war, but it obliterated a huge chunk of his calf. They didn't even send him to the field hospital for an exam, they cut off most of his lower leg on the battlefield before doing anything else.

So now she sat next to him, waiting for her arm muscles to knit back together, waiting for the buzzing in her head to clear, waiting for Peeta to emerge from the haze of morphine they had pumped him full of ever since they took his leg. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

She must have fallen asleep again, because when she woke up Peeta was awake and staring at her. "Hey," she said groggily.

"Hey," he said in return. "You're really here."

"Yeah, I am," she said. She guessed Peeta was still pretty out of it from the morphine.

"I woke up and you were there, sleeping," he said. "I was trying to figure out if you were real or if I was just imagining you."

Katniss didn't really know how to respond to that. "I'm real, Peeta."

In truth, she was kind of surprised she was here as well. For all that she and Peeta had grown closer over the course of the war, she had determined never to let it affect her, never to let it control her. She had spent the past few months putting distance between them, afraid of becoming too close, afraid she already had. But somehow this battle, seeing Peeta laying on the ground with his leg a bloody mess, seeing the blood pouring from her own arm and soaking the ground, seeing Finnick torn apart by a cannon shot and knowing he would never go home to Annie again, passing into unconsciousness not knowing if she would ever wake up or not, it had all broken something inside of her. She had spent all this time pushing Peeta away, but now she was finally willing to admit that she didn't want to do that anymore. God what a fool she'd been, wasting what might have been their last few months of their lives! Now she wanted to hold him close and never let him go. She wanted to sooth his nightmares and calm his fears. She wanted to stay with him, always. But was it too late? Maybe all these years of rejection had changed his feelings about her. Maybe he was only interested in the strong girl she used to be, not the broken shell left over at the end of this bloody war.

She wasn't likely to get any of her answers while the morphine left him so confused that he wasn't sure if she was really in the room with him or not. So she just sat there, holding his hand, hoping his mind would clear a bit more with time.

Eventually he turned to her. "What happened, Kat? We were in battle?"

"Yes. Lee was fleeing Petersburg, and we were chasing him. And we were in a battle, and you were shot. Do you remember getting shot in the leg?"

Peeta scrunched up his face, like a child trying to think really hard. Katniss tried her best to contain the smile the sight brought her. "In the leg…" Peeta said dreamily. "My leg… It feels… fuzzy…" Peeta's eyes drifted down to the end of the bed, where the sheet was clearly draped over one full leg and one that ended just below the knee. "Katniss!" he said, accidentally using her real name as a drug-addled panic consumed him. "Katniss, my leg!"

Katniss gripped his hand tighter. "Peeta," she said, but got no response. She knew she had to get him under control before some nurse showed up with another morphine shot. It was just like when he had a nightmare, but she had always had two arms to work with when she was helping him calm down after a nightmare. "_Peeta_," she tried again, repeating his name in an attempt to calm his panic. "Peeta, look at me. Peeta. I'm right here. Will you please look at me, Peeta?"

Finally, he turned towards her. His breathing began to slow, and the panic in his eyes began to dim. "Peeta, just look at me, and listen to me, okay? Can you do that?" Peeta just nodded in reply. "Peeta, you were shot in the leg. You know what happens, we've seen enough of it. They had no choice, if they hadn't amputated, you would have bled to death."

"You're right," Peeta said, some sense starting to seep into his morphine-dulled brain. "They would have to take it off."

"That's right," she said. "The doctors were all really happy that they were able to save your knee," she explained. "They said that you should be able to get around fine with a wooden leg."

Peeta let out a laugh, but there was no humor behind it. "Well, I don't exactly need agility to bake, I suppose. As long as I can hold myself upright, I guess I'll manage."

There it was, that indomitable Peeta optimism was back, quelling his fears once again. Katniss didn't know what to say, so she did her best to give him an encouraging smile.

After a brief lull in the conversation, Peeta spoke up again. "Guess I'm going home," he said.

Katniss decided to go ahead and tell him. "Peeta, we all are," she told him. At his confused look, she explained. "I heard yesterday, but you were still out of it from the morphine. Lee surrendered, Peeta. We've been here almost a week now. Grant's been chasing Lee across Virginia, and finally Lee gave up the ghost. There's still some fighting further south and Jeff Davis is still hiding in a hole somewhere, but it's only a matter of time now. For the most part the war's over. We're all gonna go home.

Katniss didn't know what reaction she was expecting. Joy or excitement would have been out of place after so much death. Relief, maybe? Whatever happened, she wasn't expecting the end of the war to depress him. But it seemed to have done so, as Peeta signed heavily, stared off into space, and dejectedly said, "Yeah. Home."

She was truly unsettled by his reaction. Had she said something wrong? Was his mind still muddled by the morphine? "Yes, home, Peeta. Where no one is trying to kill us. Where we can sleep in a bed. Where we can eat real food. Where your father's waiting for you. Home."

"What are we at home, Katniss?" Peeta's voice sounded flat, dead, completely and utterly hopeless. The sound of it robbed her of her breath; it was very rarely that Peeta used her real name, and she had never heard him say it so devoid of emotion before.

"Wh- What do you mean?" she stammered dumbly.

"When we go home, what are we?" Peeta asked in that same dead and hopeless voice, now turning to face her. His eyes seemed as dead as his voice, and yet at the same time they were desperate and pleading. "Do we go back to barely knowing each other? Are we still friends? Or more? Or less? Whatever it is we are now?" Peeta huffed out a small laugh, but there was no humor or happiness in it. "Are you even going to tell people you fought in the war? Am I going to have to pretend you're a stranger again? Pretend we aren't the reason each other is alive? Pretend we didn't keep each other sane? Pretend we never shared a bed? What happens to us when we go home?"

Peeta's words only confirmed what Katniss had already feared: This was all her fault. She had spent years alternately clinging to Peeta when she needed him and pushing him away when she was afraid of becoming too close. She had let him comfort her when she was afraid, let him hold her together when she was broken, but had never given him reason to believe that she thought of him as anything more than convenient. In truth she had been trying to convince herself that that was all he was to her, only beginning in the last few days to admit to herself how wrong she was.

She had once thought that Peeta would have to be drugged before he would ask anything from her, and it seemed she was right. Now was the time when she would finally have to decide what she wanted, to tell Peeta exactly how much she was willing to give of herself. But in the moment, her guilt and her fear and her worry and her own insecurities and her shock at Peeta's hopelessness left her unable to form a response. She opened her mouth several times trying to reply, only to close it again when nothing came out. She knew she had to respond somehow, she owed it to Peeta to explain how she was feeling, but she was completely unable to do so.

As usual, Peeta tried to come to her rescue, filling the silence that had grown between them. "Forget it," he said with a sad shake of his head, turning back to stare at the wall once again. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that. You don't owe me an explanation. I shouldn't have said that. Must be the morphine talking. Just forget I said anything."

No, no, no, no, no, no, no! This was spiraling into disaster, and it was still all her fault. Stupid Katniss and her stupid inability to express herself! Why couldn't she just spit out some words? Why couldn't she tell Peeta what she was thinking? Why couldn't she be more sure of what she was feeling? Why couldn't she be just a little bit more like Peeta right now?

If she was going to get through this without hurting Peeta even worse than she already had, she was going to need his help.

"What do you want, Peeta?" she asked, hoping he was still drugged enough to answer.

"Huh?" She realized that she had no idea how long she'd sat silently having a mini panic attack over her whatever she had with Peeta.

"When we go home," she explained. "What do you want to happen?"

Peeta finally turned back to her. "You know what I want," he said, some emotion finally entering his voice.

"Tell me," she pleaded.

Peeta heaved another heavy sigh, but his eyes never left hers. "I love you, Katniss. I know that makes you uncomfortable and I know you don't feel the same way, but I do. That'll never change. I love you, and I want to spend my life with you. I want to marry you, I want you to be my wife and I want me to be your husband. I want to go to sleep next to you every night and wake up next to you every morning. I want to be there waiting for you every day when you come back from hunting, I'll be covered in flour and you'll be spattered with blood but neither of us will care because we've both seen each other in far worse condition, and the few hours' separation was more than we could bear and we're finally together again. I want to raise a family with you, and spoil our children rotten; teach them how to hunt and how to bake and how to paint and how to sing like a songbird. I want to watch our children raise our grandchildren and know that we did right by our family, that we never abandoned them and we never beat them and we always loved them. I want to grow old with you, and the aches and pains of age won't hurt us because we'll have each other. I just want to spend every possible minute of the rest of my life with you."

Once again, Katniss was rendered completely speechless by the power of Peeta's words. He had at least answered several of her questions for her. His feelings hadn't changed; he still loved her, he still wanted her. And she knew she wanted him, too. All that remained to be seen was whether she could screw up the courage to tell him that.

Peeta was still looking at her expectantly, waiting for some kind of response. She felt like her throat was closed and her tongue was frozen and speech would be impossible, but after a few moments she was able to croak out a word. "Okay."

"What?" Peeta looked completely shocked.

Having broken the logjam, Katniss found her mouth was operable once again. "Okay. Let's do that."

"…Katniss?" Peeta asked, still not believing what he was hearing from her. Katniss swallowed. Now that she felt capable of speech, all she needed was to figure out what to say. She tried to swallow her nerves and explain herself as best as she was able.

"Peeta, I'm not good at… this," she stammered out. "Any of this! I'm not good at… saying something. I'm not good at explaining my feelings. I can barely understand my feelings half the time! I'm not like you, always so confident and so sure of yourself and making beautiful speeches at the drop of a hat. I can't do that. I'm not like that." She lifted their clasped hands from where the lay on the bed, holding them up between them. "But I can tell you this much. I'm here, right now, with you. We're here together, we have been for a lot longer than I've been willing to admit, and I don't ever want that to change. And I'm sorry it took us both almost dying before I could admit that to myself, but I swear I know it now. I want to spend my life with you, too."

Peeta just stared at her, his expression was a complex battle of conflicting emotions but surprise seemed to be the most prevalent. He opened his mouth to speak, but hesitated for a long moment before actually saying anything. He gave Katniss just enough time to have another mini panic. She was afraid that he was going to ask her if she loved him back, and she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to answer, because despite everything she had just said she still didn't feel comfortable talking about how she felt, and she was afraid that her inability to respond would ruin whatever it was that she was clinging to between her and Peeta.

Then Peeta finally spoke. "Katniss will you marry me?"

He knew her so well. She should have known him better. One of the defining truisms about their relationship was that he knew how to handle her – he knew when he could push her and when he needed to resist, he knew how to help her even when the last thing she ever wanted was to accept help, he knew when she needed to be left alone and when she needed to be embraced almost against her will. And, above all, he knew that she was a person who spoke far more easily with her actions than with her words. So he didn't ask her for words, he asked her for action. He didn't ask her to explain how she felt, he asked her to do something to show it.

Her smile was wide and genuine as she told him, "Yes."

Peeta smiled back at her. "That's all you have to say."

Katniss shook her head, but she couldn't wipe the smile from her face. "I don't know why you put up with me," she said honestly.

Peeta answered as if he was stating the obvious. "Because I love you."

And somehow, in that moment, for once in her life, her jumbled thoughts aligned themselves and her words flowed as easily as water in the creek. "I love you too, Peeta."

…..

The next morning, the nurses woke them both for breakfast. Between the two of them, they convinced the nurses to lay off on Peeta's morphine, to at least leave him coherent.

They ate in silence for a while. Katniss found it odd how quiet Peeta was being; she wondered if he was worried about her changing her mind. "Peeta, are you all right?" she asked.

In a rare display of nerves, Peeta stumbled over his words. "Um, Kat, can I, um, can I ask you something?"

Katniss wasn't sure what could be making him so nervous, but whatever it was it worried her. It certainly couldn't be anything good. "Of course. What's going on?"

"This is kind of embarrassing…" Peeta let out a nervous laugh. "I, um, I kind of… don't really remember what happened yesterday."

Katniss felt like all the blood drained from her body. "What?"

Peeta spoke quickly, trying to explain. "It's just, everything is such a blur… I'm not sure what was real and what wasn't, what actually happened and what was just in my head." He looked up at her. "We talked last night, right?"

"Yeah," was all she said.

The answer seemed to relieve Peeta a bit. "Good. I'm glad I didn't imagine the whole thing." Katniss wasn't sure what look crossed her face, but it made Peeta look away and run a hand through his hair. "I have these memories, or at least parts of memories… At least I think they're memories, some of them might be from dreams… But they're all, sort of, fuzzy around the edges."

Katniss thought back to the previous night: Peeta lethargic, half asleep, doped with morphine. She had even recognized that it was the wrong time to have a serious conversation with him. _She wasn't likely to get any of her answers while the morphine left him so confused that he wasn't sure if she was really in the room with him or not._ God, she was so stupid, she had let herself get carried away and forgot all of her reservations about Peeta's mental state.

But then, she realized, it shouldn't matter. She had sorted her thoughts and feelings out, she had decided what she wanted, whether Peeta remembered her telling him or not. She somewhat surprised herself when she realized that she had no reservations about what she had said yesterday, she had no regrets or second thoughts. Everything she had told Peeta last night was equally true this morning, and if she had to tell him again, then she'd just tell him again.

So when Peeta lamented, "I just can't tell which memories are real and which aren't," Katniss replied calmly.

"Then you should ask, Peeta."

Peeta looked at her for a moment, searching her face for something. Finally, he said, "We broke the lines at Petersburg, real or not real?"

"Real."

He nodded. She could almost see his mind working, filing this fact away. "We took Richmond, real or not real?"

"The army took Richmond, real. Not us personally," she clarified.

"Right," Peeta said. "Lee surrendered and the war's over, real or not real?"

"Lee surrendered, that's real. Joe Johnston is still fighting and Jeff Davis is still hiding somewhere, so the war isn't totally over yet."

Peeta seemed to digest this for a moment. "I lost my leg," he said, and raised his leg off the bed for a moment so that the bedsheet obviously draped over the stump where his leg now ended. "I guess that one was real."

"Yeah."

He dropped his leg, and hesitated for just a moment before he asked, "My mother showed up on the battlefield dressed as a Confederate general and took out half the company with a wooden spoon, real or not real?"

Katniss smiled despite herself. "Not real."

Peeta grinned back at her. "Yeah, I had a feeling that one was a dream."

He looked at her then, and somehow she knew what he was going to ask next. He glanced at the door before he whispered his question, still mindful of the nurses in the next room and the act she had to maintain until she was safely out of the army. It was a question that had struck her with terror just the previous night, but now she felt almost unnaturally calm, because now she knew for sure what her answer was.

It was an answer she could never have given before the war, when survival for herself and her family had consumed her completely, leaving no room for any other considerations. It was a question she could never have answered during the war, when the constant presence of death and the desperate need to just make it through to tomorrow had left her completely unable to process what she was feeling or why.

But now, after, when he whispered, "You love me, real or not real?"

She told him, "Real."

…..

_Aw. I love it when an Everlark comes together. :)_

_Originally, this chapter ended with the "I love you, too." It was while I was struggling with Chapter 5 that the idea to include Real or Not Real here occurred to me. I still think it might be a bit over the top and indulgent, but it might also be my favorite bit of this story._

_Next chapter: Homecoming! _


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